IDC Opinion

It is cliche at this point to say that the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way that we work. From location to time, from blurring the boundaries between work and life to profound restructuring of the labor market, the past two years ushered in changes many thought were decades away. This, perforce, forced a change to all software markets supporting remote work, asynchronous work, and workforce automation. To meet this challenge, organizations purchased a wide variety of solutions including virtual client computing (VCC).

Desktop as a service (DaaS) is one modality of the virtual client computing market and is encompassed in the larger VCC IDC MarketScape (see IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Virtual Client Computing 2022–2023 Vendor Assessment, IDC #US49857422, November 2022) published contemporaneously with this one. It is also, however, a unique approach to application and desktop virtualization, combining software, prescriptive infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and some degree of professional services, many of which are automated or included within the design.

DaaS emerged as a potential service offering alongside more general cloud computing as was initially focused on including cloud infrastructure resources into existing virtualization solutions. However, it quickly became apparent that more was needed. In particular, customers pushed for defined specialized IaaS configurations, often including graphics acceleration, for specific use cases. They also began to push for opinionated architectures, monitoring solutions, and professional operations and management solutions.

This later need was originally met (and still is in some cases) by professional systems integrators and managed service providers (managed SPs). However, the resource constraints which appear as early as 2017 and became acute in 2020 pushed providers forcefully into offering more and more automation and inbuilt observability, sometimes isolated from the larger cloud environment, sometimes focused on endpoint management, and sometimes integrated into the larger ecosystem.

This larger ecosystem concern again forced divergence on the “DaaS” market, leading to a wide variance between solutions all offered under the same label. Customer interviews and survey results both point toward this being a large area of confusion, one which will be addressed in future research projects.

Finally, DaaS’ genesis as a “cloud first” technology means DaaS has been particularly susceptible to the trend revealed in IDC’s June 2022 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 5, where enterprises look first to their primary public cloud providers as their primary strategic technology provider, followed by their primary hardware vendors. This has forced the public cloud providers to step up, offering unique DaaS solutions that meet the strategic requirements of their largest customers.

Tech Buyer Advice

Desktop as a service is one of several components in an end-user computing strategy and an extension of both the enterprises employee engagement/labor and compute management strategies. As such, it needs to be considered in that larger context, especially as companies reconsider their cloud spending.

Before considering DaaS, the IT teams need to think about how they intend to provide reliable, transparent, and operatable access to the corporation’s:

• Employees and processes — the individuals and methods that make up how the corporation gets work done on the customer’s behalf
• Data and resources — the information and tools the employees use to either assist other employees or deliver on the negotiated processes
• Partners and suppliers — the organizations that provide goods and services the enterprise needs to deliver data and resources for the employees to execute on processes on behalf of the customer

With this framework in place, DaaS represents one way to acquire the software needed for employees to work through the processes of organizing data and resources using tools provided by partners and suppliers. In particular:

• DaaS provides a desktop, which uses resources not located on the local device.
• The desktop is managed in whole or in part by a third party, likely using AI/ML methods rather than human beings.
• The desktop draws resources from a public cloud provider that may or may not provide the management services.
• The desktop can be accessed from any device, although the degree of access may depend on the operating system of the device, its associated web browser, and any agents installed on the device. In some cases, this allows for the long-promised “bring your own device” (BYOD) approach, but some organizations find the need to secure and control the endpoint prohibits using unowned devices in some circumstances.
• Pricing for the compute, software, and management combination may be variable based on utilization and fixed rate and based on credits that can be applied to a wide range of services including DaaS.
• The skills needed to manage DaaS are, generally, much easier to find than those needed to manage and support a full virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. This comes at a cost in configuration and flexibility — the DaaS provider must make many assumptions about configurations, operations, and security, which might not meet the enterprises specific requirements.

Methodology