In the age of remote work and distributed teams, end-user computing via virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) has taken on greater importance for organizations that need to scale compute resources quickly at the lowest cost.

Unfortunately, traditional virtual desktop infrastructure deployments have gotten a bit of a bad name over the years. That’s because they’re typically on-premises and CapEx heavy, not very performant, slow to implement, and expensive to maintain and upgrade. Indeed, these deployments are so complex that they often require a virtualization expert to keep things from going off the rails.

There is a better way to implement high-performing, secure, and cost-effective virtual desktops for teams anywhere in the world with an internet connection: Cloud DaaS. Let’s explore how. 

What is End-User Computing (EUC)?

End-user computing (EUC) is a series of tools and technologies that allow users to securely access company data, resources, and computing power from virtually any device and any location with an internet connection. 

Unlike traditional deployments—where IT installs a user’s operating system (OS) and applications on a physical computer—a modern EUC deployment installs these tools on a virtual machine (VM). Types of EUC include virtual desktop infrastructure, desktop-as-a-service, and enterprise browsers, either on premises or in the cloud. 

VDI usually refers to self-managed, on-prem solutions, while DaaS is often used to describe a managed, cloud-based solution that uses virtual machines as cloud PCs. 

Either way, EUC has come a very long way since its early days a couple of decades ago.

The Problem(s) With Legacy DaaS and VDI

Even though traditional, on-premesis VDI pioneered by Citrix and VMware in the 1990s was once considered cutting edge, it always had some pretty serious drawbacks.  

EUC two decades ago usually required an on-prem Citrix or VMware software installation in your data center. But managing such complex on-prem deployments often required expensive consultants on top of an in-house IT group—and that’s not even counting licensing fees, server costs, and other high-end hardware.

Today, this kind of legacy software carries additional downsides:

1. It’s old technology. Traditional remote desktop software has the same problem as many other legacy technology businesses: Old code, and lots of it. Much of it was written a couple decades ago, when internet infrastructure wasn’t nearly as strong and reliable as it is today. It all adds up to bloated codebases that don't fit today’s use cases especially well. 
   
   Case in point: Many legacy providers still rely on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) when transferring data between virtual machines and user endpoints, even when streaming video. But TCP sacrifices speed for reliability. While this may have made sense a couple of decades ago, the reliability of today’s internet means there’s no need to deal with unnecessary latency when streaming high-resolution video or performing other CPU- or GPU-heavy tasks on a virtual desktop.
   
   
2. It’s (even more) expensive. Both VMware and Citrix have never been cheap—but both were acquired by private equity firms relatively recently, and their prices have gone up in kind. Software licenses for Citrix reportedly increased by 2x this year, and the news isn’t much better where VMware is concerned. Because most contracts are usually between three and five years at minimum, vendor lock-in is also a significant concern.
   
   
3. It’s a significant IT burden. Traditional DaaS deployments can be unnecessarily complex to set up and maintain, often requiring internal IT resources and a dedicated consultant or resource. This can get expensive, and defocus IT teams, in a hurry.

Then, one day, cloud DaaS came along; and everything changed. 

How Cloud DaaS Reduces Overall EUC Costs

Cloud DaaS can reduce your overall EUC costs in several ways compared to traditional VDI—including moving from a CapEx to OpEx model, which allows companies to scale up or down quickly without purchasing expensive hardware.

Here are some of the top ways cloud DaaS can reduce your overall EUC spend.  

You can move from a CapEx to OpEx model

As mentioned above, you don’t need to purchase or upgrade your own hardware and infrastructure with cloud DaaS—instead, you use virtual desktops via a pay-as-you-go or subscription model. This dramatically reduces capital expenses and provides better predictability around EUC costs.  

Organizations using cloud DaaS also don’t need to buy and maintain expensive client devices for employees or contractors, because all the computing power, apps, and storage they need is in the cloud. This helps extend the lifecycle of an organization’s current devices—eliminating the need for 3-5 year hardware refresh cycles—and even allows organizations to implement bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. 

You can scale up and down faster and cheaper

Cloud DaaS means organizations don’t need to buy hardware to accommodate a sudden surge in demand, or deal with unused capital expenses if demand drops. Virtual desktop infrastructure in the cloud can quickly and easily scale up or down based on changing demand, giving organizations the  flexibility to remove or add desktops as demand dictates with zero pain. 

The power of cloud DaaS also means you can skip the cost and logistical nightmare of shipping (and eventually trying to recover) laptops to remote employees, contractors, or overseas resources. Under a traditional model, those laptops are full of valuable company data. 

You can make your IT group more effective

The simplified management of cloud DaaS means the provider handles most of the heavy maintenance lifting: maintenance, updates, security patches, and more. This helps scale your IT group by removing a ton of responsibility—allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks—while ensuring vital patches and updates are completed as soon as possible (which doesn’t always happen in an on-prem setup, often leaving systems dangerously exposed for lengthy periods).

You can achieve faster time to value

The setup and configuration of on-prem remote desktop infrastructure deployments can be a time-consuming and painful experience that hinders time-to-market for companies in a hyper-competitive environment. Cloud DaaS facilitates the fast deployment of virtual desktops whenever you need them with just a few clicks, because all provisioning and configuration is handled by the provider.

Instead of waiting days to receive a company laptop, any of your remote collaborators can immediately leverage their own devices, connect them to your cloud DaaS, and get to productivity on Day One. 

You can achieve greater remote productivity (and security)

Cloud DaaS is tailor-made for remote work use cases. As mentioned, with cloud DaaS a company’s data doesn’t ever reside on an employee’s local machine—a potential lifesaver for organizations utilizing offshore resources but who need data to reside in the U.S. at all times.

Instead of keeping information on an easily stolen or tampered with laptop hard drive, the data lives on an isolated, highly secure virtual machine in the cloud. If an employee moves on or is terminated, your IT group simply needs to revoke their credentials rather than engaging in a lengthy back-and-forth to get the hardware returned. 

For those in regions with spotty connectivity or where it’s not always easy to procure high-performance laptops, cloud DaaS opens up a world of performance possibilities for anyone with a connected device. 

Softdrive: Modern and Effective Cloud DaaS That Saves Money

Instead of dealing with latency, needless expense, and other issues created by legacy remote desktop software, Softdrive cloud DaaS provides a suite of modern virtualization tools that help get organizations to value faster—and keep them there. 

Softdrive automatically and dynamically adapts to a user’s available bandwidth and internet quality. It’s so flexible and performant, we’ve even seen it work well 30,000 feet in the air on airline Wi-Fi. 

Users receive all the cost-saving benefits of cloud DaaS we mentioned earlier—an OpEx cost model, fast scaling without unnecessary expense, reduced IT and management burden, and greater remote productivity for less money. However Softdrive offers further benefits for those who need high-performance PCs, from general use to heavy 3D and 4D applications:

• Streaming: Softdrive utilizes the ultra-fast User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for video streaming to remove latency, along with the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, or H265) lossless video compression standard, YUV444 data format (transmitting at 24 bits per pixel), 40Mbps connectivity, 4K resolution, and 60-plus frames per second (FPS) framerates. 
• Remote productivity: Softdrive uses TCP for data transfers between the local machine and cloud that require every packet to arrive, without fail. It also handles a variety of keyboards, mice, game controllers, tablets, webcams, microphones, USB devices, and multiple monitors, along with unlimited storage. 
• Virtualization: CPU virtualization, GPU virtualization, and hypervisor and remote desktop software that communicate with each other to deliver superior performance. 
• Management: Softdrive is so easy to manage, even a CEO can do it. And Softdrive instances can be production-ready in just a couple of hours without requiring a virtualization expert. 

It all comes with enterprise-grade security and authentication tools out of the box, including single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA), Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) encryption, and SOC 2 data protection certification.

Contact Softdrive today to book a demo and learn how your organization can run the latest, most intensive software applications without hardware upgrades; stream powerful cloud PCs anywhere with an internet connection; and provision cloud PCs and get teams rolling in hours (not weeks).