How Does DaaS (Desktop as a Service) Boost Convenience and Security for Your Business?
Hi, Max Clark. This is 20 minutes max. I'm doing a little rant about something that's near and dear to my heart, which we now call desktop as a service I have no idea who came up with this name and I really hate it and despise it but you know, when you know 1997 we called it terminal services and then after that we called it virtual desktop and and now it's called Daz and funny thing about this is how cyclic things in technology actually are right so the birth of computing we had what you now would think of as a mainframe but there was a or it was really funny because they actually called them mini computers but they weren't so many they were quite large But so, you know, university, a large company would would have this really large centralized computer, and then there were terminals connected to it. But, you know, so what you saw on the terminal was just a screen. It was just the input and the output device.
Speaker 1:Right? A keyboard connected and a screen and the ability to send, you know, but it was really just this computer off in the basement somewhere and you were interacting with that and, and and that's what you had and there was job scheduling and time slicing and all these different things. We could talk about the birth of the Internet as a relation to this in a moment, but the birth of personal computing really did a few things it drove down the cost and the affordability of computers and it made it accessible for people to have them in their houses. Whenever you get into a situation where volume applies against commodity with more volume the commodity the price of the commodity drives down so what happens personal computer gets faster and faster and faster and faster and cost less and less and less and less per unit of computing meanwhile these other things these mainframes are still very expensive and you know, like these giant black boxes that sit in the basement that that, you know, are nightmares. And we have this massive push and shift away from centralized computing into, you know, edge edge.
Speaker 1:Oh ho. We got the edge in there edge computing. We got, you know, with personal computers and devices, you know, we saw this of course in the 90s the birth of the Internet and then, you know, really through the 2000s and, you know, we keep we keep pushing forward. So anyways, okay, let's go trying to bring us all back together Max. So terminal services and VDI and now Daz are a push back into, this this full circle.
Speaker 1:It's closing a loop. So now you've got a centralized resource. You've got, you know, usually a cluster of machines clusters another one of my favorite terms But you've got a series of computers running usually in a data center and and the desktop the the processing the storage Everything that's happening is happening on those machines in that central location. And then your remote terminal is connecting to it. Now, first question I get when when we talk about this stuff usually is if these people say, well, what does it look like?
Speaker 1:Well, it looks exactly like what you're experiencing right now. Instead of having a box with a processor and a graphics card in a hard drive underneath your desk or on top of your desk or you know built into your monitor all you really see is just the monitor and the keyboard and and the mouse or the trackpad right there's a network cable that plugs into it it's it's still windows okay like you know secret ingredient of the secret ingredient soup is there is no secret ingredient it is still windows and you can connect to these things with dedicated terminals you can connect to it with fancy terminals for specialized networking like PCO IP and Teradici and like yada yada yada or you can just use your remote desktop and you can remote desktop into one of these platforms you know so you have some sort of client access device and then you have your actual computing device let's just call it that way right where the actual desktop loads and where the data webs and the processing lives okay so why do you care why do we care about DAS and this is where tech marketing and we just go completely sideways in the tech space right because we start talking about speeds and feeds and features and benefits and we miss the jobs to be done so why do we care about this stuff well the first thing is it is ridiculously easy to onboard and off board staff when you have centralized computing like this you are not going out and touching a machine in a desktop in a cubicle and configuring it or you know what what normally would happen in a help desk is you know they and configuring it.
Speaker 1:Or, you know, what what normally would happen in a help desk is, you know, they would have and they they bring the computer back to their help desk, and they would do the work, and they would install Windows on it, install the software, then take it out to the computer. By the way, MDM and UEM is a is a solution in absence of a DaaS platform. Cause in the DAS platform you say hey we want to update our software what do you do you have a centralized thing that you have to update and it automatically updates everything else there is no, like, oh whoops I kicked over my computer tower and blew it up right like that doesn't happen So okay. Very easy to onboard and offboard when you have, you know, an office environment and people don't have to, like, walk up and down the stairs and go talk to your help desk. Your help desk can all be in one location.
Speaker 1:Your IT team can be in one spot, and it's really easy. Okay. Now when you go from work from home, you go to remote workforce. Now think about that from an onboarding, offboarding. What are you doing?
Speaker 1:Well, you are usually buying a laptop and shipping a laptop to somebody. And hopefully, you're buying a laptop and then having it configured and then ship. Maybe you're not. Maybe you're buying a laptop and shipping it to somebody and then creating a phone call with some sort of, you know, team viewer session to go through and do the rest of configuration, which is completely nuts. Or, you know, you're doing an MDM enrollment.
Speaker 1:You're using Intune or, you know, some variant AirWatch or something to actually do that deployment. The okay. So in theory, that works fine. Okay. I might might let's you you've got a Mac fleet.
Speaker 1:Right? So you've got jamf preloaded with Apple Business and Business Manager and laptop unplugs and or they open it up and then boom they go through the enrollment. They they so even really expensive devices that you're shipping all over the place and you've got them in the field and they they're breakable, you know? Think about it from an economic standpoint. You know, $3,000 laptops being, like, FedExed all over the place.
Speaker 1:And then you've got to now off board and and reclaim all that equipment. What usually happens when off boarding is people don't reclaim the equipment. Maybe they issue or put delete command and they say, okay, you know, you can keep the gear. So if we think about this, you know, in the last few months when companies have gone through massive layoffs, you're now writing down the value of the IT asset that's in the field because it's too complicated to try to even think about getting that gear back. It comes across as a really nice piece of, like, corporate goodwill and separation of, like, oh, you can keep the device.
Speaker 1:But in reality, for the majority of those companies, they made the decision that it was not worth the energy for them to get the device back versus just writing it off and letting the employee keep it at separation Yeah, I get a little cynical with these things because I've seen the sausage be made so to speak so that works great when you're in you know, like if you're a US company and you're dealing with US employees Let's talk about onboarding off boarding somebody in Latin America You know, you you have a team in Mexico or Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil. You can't just ship them gear, first off. If you haven't done this yet, just trust me when I say this or don't trust me. Go ahead and do it and experience this for the first time for yourself. And and then, you know, you'll you'll remember this.
Speaker 1:But you have this really pesky thing called customs that you have to deal with. So you're gonna ship equipment to a country that has to clear customs first and depending on when your gear gets to that port of entry and what else is on that port of entry and what the value of that equipment on that port of entry is, you go from like maybe this only takes 2 weeks to get gear to somebody to like 4 or 5 6 weeks to get gear to somebody. Plus, you have to pay import duty taxes on it. This is why you want to buy equipment in country always, versus shipping gear to them. So so we talk about it from like, you know what what's why is this relevant in the world of Daz well in Daz You know you can have a BYOB policy BYOD BYOD policy.
Speaker 1:It's not Friday. Why am I thinking BYOB BYOD policy? Hey, you've already got a computer at your house great You can just use that computer install this software to connect to our DaaS platform. Look at this. You know?
Speaker 1:You can use whatever you've got. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's slow. It doesn't matter if it's fast. It doesn't matter if it's new.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter if it's old. You can just launch this application, or you can, you know, use this browser plug in, and you can connect, and you can get our desktop, and you can get access to our environment into our data and it's instantaneously accepted your offer, you know, your congratulations. You're you're coming on board. It's instant provisioning. You don't have to wait weeks to get somebody on and working and efficient.
Speaker 1:You can have them up and running, like, immediately. Just just just, like, like finger snap kind of fast. What else is great about Daz? Well, in that example where the data lives. So this becomes a really interesting example when you're going through any sort of compliancy.
Speaker 1:If you're gonna go through a sock or pip HIPAA or PCI, if you're bringing on international employees or contractors, if you have US employees or contractors, you talk about where does the data actually live? If you've been around the block at some point, you've heard a horrible story about somebody who had a laptop in their car and the laptop in their car had data on it. It shouldn't have because they were doing something. They downloaded all this data to Excel, and then the car got stolen. And then there's an Excel file on the desktop that has everybody's Social Security number and, salary information and home address and, birthday.
Speaker 1:Whoops. Seriously, this happens all the time. Right? There is you're doing software development your software tech company your internet company and you have now you have you start talking about your application stack your intellectual property the you know crown jewels now does that sit on devices that you control? Or can that be downloaded and copied onto devices that you can't control?
Speaker 1:And a few lawsuits about this recently involving self driving cars and executives leaving one company and going to another company and stuff being downloaded or not. If you just remove the ability for it to be downloaded, like, you don't even have this conversation. So I mean, like, you need a policy around it in your corporate handbook of, like, don't download our data. Just don't make it possible to download the data in the first place. It's incredible the difference that you have.
Speaker 1:So that's a really good example. When you start talking about supply chain issues, you get a question from a upstream or downstream vendor client. You know, how do you ensure that our data or your data is only on company owned equipments? You deal with laptops. You deal with it by deploying, you know, an MDM or UEM solution and then self signed certificates.
Speaker 1:And then you're gonna use some sort of DLP and CASB, you know, overlay on top of that and maybe use ETNA client in order to, you know, authenticate the user. And you've got some sort of strong authentication and MFA and all these different things. And so now we're just talking about layering, which is layered on, like stack, stack, stack, stack, stack, stack of different pieces of software in order to ensure this stuff. Or you just don't do any of it. And you just say, hey.
Speaker 1:Okay. Great. You know, our data only exists on our platform, in our data center, or in this case, our vendor's infrastructure. They're a platform that we're we're, our private our private cloud for this. No way for it to download because there's nowhere to download it to you can't download this stuff So we like we like that and you could talk about it from a ransomware security environment You know big issue and a big problem with ransomware is you know if you've got you know, let's just do the math here, right?
Speaker 1:Let's just say you have a 1,000 that you know you have a 1,000 devices We'll just use a 1,000. It's nice round number in a 1,000 devices Maybe you're lucky in their own one office Maybe you're not lucky and you know 20% are in office and say 80% are outside of an office and you have a ransomware attack and all of your devices are encrypted. Well, now you've got to what do you do? Well, you know, you've got to you know, maybe best case scenario. You're just reinstalling an operating system on all those devices and formatting the hard drive.
Speaker 1:Well, it takes time. It takes time per device. You know, let's say you're exceedingly efficient at this and it only takes 30 minutes per device times a 1,000 devices. Right? So you've got 500 hours worth of work that you have to do in order to get your your your operations back in a point where people can actually work on a computer.
Speaker 1:So DAS doesn't prevent ransomware. It accelerates recovery from it because you have this concept of a golden image. Right? So there's this this thing where it's like, you know, for our fill in the blank team, they've got this. This is the the environment that they need.
Speaker 1:You know, they need this software. So you create this golden image and this golden image is all the software that they need in order to run. So when you have a new person come into that team, you just say, basically, copy copy this this golden image onto their into their desktop well now in the process to recover a 1,000 desktops is deleting and just recreating a 1,000 desktops and there's I mean luck there's there's nuances and it's a lot more involved in that but as a very simplistic example I'll just make that case. And I'm sure I'll get a few comments. Go ahead and flame me.
Speaker 1:I don't care. Actually, I do care. But go ahead and flame me and tell me how wrong I am and then we'll get into the nuances of this stuff if you really care about it. There's a lot of ways to implement Daz. You're gonna see this a lot more now.
Speaker 1:There were some companies that that started doing this with Macs. Mac stadium was a good one. You know, people are so accustomed to developing on Mac desktops that it became like, hey, look, we can do a virtualized Mac. It's not even virtualized. Those Mac minis and a data center in Atlanta, I believe.
Speaker 1:Azure is now, AWS offers virtualized Windows desktops. Azure has, Azure virtual desktop, AVD. There's a lot of vendors implement x, Citrix and VMware on top of Azure. There is Automation orchestration platforms for this stuff. I'm gonna let you in on the on the secret which is yes, you can use You know a you know Azure virtual desktop to do this stuff, but it's not easy to run yourself It's be the equivalent of like, you know, deciding that you were gonna install exchange back in your office and run exchange on prem for your users versus being on 365 or being on Google Workspace.
Speaker 1:Like you could do it, but you're gonna have to hire a lot of experts in order to do it and then you'd be kind of crazy to do it because you're spending a lot of money in order to do it versus spending that money and those resources doing other things and, becoming experts in maintaining the Daz platform is probably not where you want to be for your business like that's probably provides 0 incremental value to your operations or 0 incremental leverage to you. So you wanna run DaaS. Don't run it yourself. Like, again, it's a scale thing. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, other people can go invest in data centers, and they can invest in less software licensing, and they can invest in support staff and teams and experts and and engineers and firewall people and all the different stuff right and, you can pay them for that investment and they staff at 247 and they maintain it 247, you know, you don't have to think about or deal with all any of that stuff and then of course you got a contract and they have an SLA that they have to adhere to so we like these things by the way if you're saying well how does this apply to me we run Macs today and we need to have access to all these development tools when does it this really crazy thing not too long ago go and it's called Windows subsystem Linux WSL and the the dirty secret is is you can run a Windows desktop with WSL on it and get a Damien instance on it or whatever other instance you want and you can code whatever code you want to code. You can code you can code you can code you get access to the same tooling and if you're building anything that's going containerized, the pipeline is actually really efficient.
Speaker 1:This is not, you know, there's there you know, if you're coming from Mac to Windows, there is some learning curve, but I I promise you, your developers are probably already running Versus Code because you wanna run GitHub Copilot on it. And guess what? Versus code is written by Microsoft and it runs just fine on Windows and if you're running Python or Go or Node. Js or you know Ruby or any of these other languages and you're creating containers, that works just fine with WSL and you can you can take advantage of it. So anyways, what is Daz?
Speaker 1:Daz is your desktop in the cloud? I mean, that's that's just we'll just use I hate the cloud term but it's it's your desktop running in the cloud and if you're onboarding and off boarding if you need to rapidly turn up a team somewhere, you know, you wanna you wanna hire 200 developers in Colombia. You wanna hire 200 developers in Argentina. You wanna bring on a customer service team in the Philippines and you want to do it quickly and you want to do it securely and you want to have control over it and you want to manage it and you want to have control over your data and you do not want to be shipping expensive boxes all over the place and you don't have to worry about getting expensive boxes back or those expensive boxes breaking. That's wonderful.
Speaker 1:It solves all of those problems for you. It doesn't know a very efficient manner. So that's is great. We like to ask or vdi or terminal services or AVD or whatever the heck you want to call it today. I don't even care anymore.
Speaker 1:The virtualized desktop is a it's not a it's not us. What's the first expression? It's not a hammer looking for a nail like it is a solution to a lot of problems and, you should be looking at it because it's awesome. Anyways, I'm max 20 minutes max. Hope this help you.
Speaker 1:Hope this helps you.
