You may have heard of Desktop-as-a-Service, with its projections of
17% CAGR and $10B market size within a few years, and wondered, “what is this” and “is this for me”?
Before we get to DaaS, it is essential to understand VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Virtual desktops are a way to access your company’s applications through your company’s data infrastructure, which might be managed on-prem or via an MSP. Or put another way, think about what applications you might use at your desktop every day at work – Microsoft Office, your CRM of choice, your desktop clients, etc. and these would be in your company’s data infrastructure instead of hosted on your computer. So, you have a virtual desktop because what you see via your endpoint is all virtual and hosted in a typical company data structure environment. Access to these applications occurs only via the endpoint that your company gives you. Your endpoint may be a laptop, or because your endpoint doesn’t need all the processing power it might have before, your endpoint can be more of a thin client.
DaaS is a virtual desktop but totally within the cloud and outside of your IT infrastructure per se. A cloud service provider would deliver these virtual desktops to employees, customized to each employee’s needs, just like UCaaS does. As with UCaaS (compared to on-prem UC), the DaaS provider takes care of maintenance, updates, storage, and back-ups. Your IT department doesn’t need to do that.
And your DaaS provider takes care of security as well. Security is a big issue these days. Weekly we read about security breaches and ransomware attacks. If you go a cloud provider route, typically, they will be on the leading edge of security compared to if you had to do it for your own business. In this way, any cloud provider or DaaS provider can be seen as providing a more secure environment. But additional security is also obtained because the endpoints are managed – i.e., various ways into the network are centralized.
So, in a nutshell, DaaS is a cloud-based virtual desktop.
And Sangoma offers it.