What’s Your Definition of “Turnkey” Desktop as a Service (DaaS)?
Everyone knows that public cloud adoption is mainstream these days, and one of the most strategic moves an IT department can make toward fulfilling a cloud-first gameplan is moving their desktop workloads to the cloud. However, there are a few “flavors” of Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions, and the differences between them have huge implications for your business. Vendors and managed service providers (MSPs) all use the term “turnkey DaaS”, but it means something different depending on who is saying it. Understanding those differences is important for IT leaders so they can select the DaaS service that best supports their business. At Workspot, when we say our cloud PC service on Microsoft Azure is “turnkey”, here’s what we mean.
1st Party or 3rd Party?
While I am all for parties, when it comes to DaaS, the 1st party is the best party. Why? It has to do with the degree of control you have as a consumer of the service and the amount of influence you can have when it comes to new feature development. The DaaS of yesteryear is typically run by a 3rd party – a managed service provider (MSP) – who runs a legacy software stack that was developed by someone else. They have very little influence over the roadmap for that stack, and that means you, as the consumer of the service, have even less. In my view, this is really a disconnect from everything that is possible in the cloud era – namely, agile development, which enables dynamic roadmaps. A DaaS service that can quickly respond to customer requirements – in weeks or even days – sure sounds better than the months or years it typically takes legacy providers to respond to feature requests. And with an MSP between you and the tech developer, how do you even make your needs heard? With a 1st party provider, you have direct access to make those requests. With Workspot as your 1st party provider, you have customer success champions that intercept your requirements and take them directly to the development team for consideration. The architects and IT leaders we talk with value having this close proximity to where decisions are made about service features, and we value the input our production customers offer that turns into new features. The “1st party” flavor of DaaS makes that kind of partnership with customers real, and that’s the way we believe it should work.
Do-it-Yourself Fans have Options
Some organizations have large enough IT teams with the right skillsets to actually build a cloud virtual desktop solution, implement it and then maintain it on an ongoing basis. There are vendors from whom you can buy a VDI control plane that lives in the cloud, and then you build on top of that to complete the solution. We refer to this is “Broker-as-a-Service”, although some of the vendors that offer this capability will call it” turnkey DaaS”. It’s ok if they want to call it turnkey, but it’s really “turnkey Broker-as-a-Service”, not turnkey DaaS. As the consumer of the service, you need to know what will be required of your IT team to implement and maintain it. It’s sort of like if Salesforce offered you a “turnkey” CRM solution, but then you find out that your IT team has to size and procure the infrastructure for the service, implement it, update it, troubleshoot it, and fix it when any of the components break (you own the SLA!). It’s not our idea of “turnkey”, but again, “turnkey” is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. For Workspot, “Do-it-Yourself DaaS” is diametrically opposed to “turnkey DaaS”. There’s just no confusing the two things. DIY is fine if you have the IT resources to deal with it – and a truly turnkey DaaS solution is the right choice if you want PCs in the cloud that are just there for you, with 99.95% availability. Plus, none of the DIY options are cloud-native, and that has a whole bunch of consequences too, but that’s another blog.
Turnkey DaaS Done Right – What Customers Want
We define turnkey DaaS in terms of what enterprise architects and IT leaders need – that’s what really matters. Here’s what prospects and customers tell us they want from their turnkey DaaS service:
- Fast time-to-value
- 99.95% cloud PC service availability
- Flat-rate, predictable pricing
- Enterprise-ready
No infrastructure, no maintenance, no upgrades. Easy scalability that happens across cloud regions in minutes. is that your idea of turnkey too?
That’s our definition of turnkey DaaS, as told to us by the people who matter most – our customers.
