IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) as a concept is well defined with many players and products in the space such as VMware vCloud Director, Cisco Intelligent Automation, CA AppLogic, VCE Vblock, etc. Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), on the other hand, tends to invoke thoughts of a cloud provider offering hosted Windows desktops. But when approached as a subset of ITaaS, DaaS enables greater synergy, efficiency and agility.
Just another Set of Workloads
Given traditional isolation of physical desktops from the rest of the data center, organizations naturally tend to treat virtual desktops as a silo as well. This tendency is reinforced by the scarcity of current solutions integrating desktops as part of private clouds. Even VMware View is not yet integrated into VMware vCloud Director. But when you think about it, virtual desktops already have some cloud-like properties such as the consolidation of resources into centralized pools and the ability to provision many non-persistent desktops on the fly.
And while virtual desktops certainly have different requirements than virtual servers around performance, security and reliability – at the end of the day, they’re just another set of workloads. It makes economic sense to leverage, where reasonable, the same back-end infrastructure management console, tools, processes and IT staff expertise from the server to the desktop.
The concept of DaaS extends beyond internally hosting Microsoft applications and extends to the cloud. An IT administrator, for example, may decide it makes more sense for the organization to host its Exchange server with a trusted public cloud provider. Or perhaps it is preferable to move away from Microsoft all together and use an Exchange compatible cloud-based solution such as VMware Zimbra, or possibly one offering a different look and feel such as Gmail. A desktop is, after all, just a means for accessing applications.
Poor IT Reputation for Customer Service
IT has generally not had the best reputation for customer service. But to be fair, it has been saddled with the huge inefficiencies, rigidity and high costs of a traditional physical data center. Studies show that 70% of the typical IT budget goes to just keeping the lights on. This doesn’t leave a lot left over for innovation or for creative customer care.
Until fairly recently, IT hasn’t really had any competition. Now, however, there is the cloud. User desires are no longer necessarily stymied by IT constraints. I recently read a statistic claiming that over half of the virtual machines on Amazon Web Services are now purchased via credit card directly by business units – bypassing IT. Of course, IT is still responsible for the security, integrity, and regulatory compliance of the organization’s servers and desktops wherever they are located. The cloud, unmanaged, poses a true threat to that mission.
By embracing both ITaaS and DaaS as a subset, IT introduces extensive automation and efficiencies enabling a much higher level of customer service. An accompanying reduction in cost allows IT to compete more effectively from a pricing standpoint with external public cloud providers. Utilizing a portal to monitor workloads wherever they may be hosted facilitates IT’s ability to embrace the best of private and public cloud platforms while maintaining a large measure of control.
A New Era of IT Productivity
Reducing the need to spend so much time babysitting equipment and performing mundane repetitive tasks enables the IT staff to instead focus their talents on using technology to achieve organizational business objectives such as increasing top-line revenues, acquiring more customers and enabling more customer stickiness. Not only does this benefit the organization, but it also is good for the IT staff. For one thing, the job becomes a lot more fun. The staff also acquires more valuable skills and, in the process, enhances their own career paths.
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