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Special Offer for Current Managed Services IT Clients

Managed Services IT will waive all cloud migration costs, saving you $7,500-$10,000, and offer free training from a certified IT trainer! Schedule a demo to see how you can take advantage of a fully integrated, managed solution for a single monthly fee. Call Jim today at 609-790-4215 for your free demo!

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Why You Should Leverage Desktop-as-a-Service

Earlier this year, we were contacted by a firm that had been thrown for a loop by COVID-19. After shutting down their physical offices, their team was struggling to get work done from home. Tax season had been extended and audit season was coming, so they needed to get their remote working situation straightened out quickly.

Most of the troubles were being caused by the firm’s VPN connection.

VPNs were built to enable employees to occasionally work from remotely. Maybe their car wouldn’t start, their child was sick, or they were traveling to a conference. VPNs were not built to support an entire staff working from home full-time.
This firm had 22 users connecting to their office computers through a VPN simultaneously. With a VPN, you have to go through multiple hops from your home computer to the internet, to a firewall, to the internet at the office, to the computer at the office.

This makes a VPN connection incredibly slow and unreliable when everyone is using it at the same time. Simply connecting and getting started can take five to 10 minutes. It’s a productivity killer.

VPN also has limited flexibility and functionality. You can’t use a dual screen setup. You can’t print from home. You can’t customize your display. It’s just not the same as working at the office.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem was obvious. We moved them to our cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution.

The Advantages of DaaS over VPN

When you log into your laptop from home with DaaS, you see exactly what you would see if you were in the office. You see a Windows 10 environment. You see your applications. You see shared drives. You see your files. You can customize your display and use two screens. You can print.

We migrated this firm’s applications to the cloud. The entire Microsoft 365 suite (Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, etc.), UltraTax, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and other applications now reside in the cloud rather than an on-premises computer or server.

Their users can work anywhere with an internet connection. Applications run faster and service is more reliable because users log directly into the cloud platform. Every time they log in, they use the latest version of each application.

The Advantages of the Cloud over On-Premises Infrastructure

Managed Services IT uses the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Unlike VPN, Azure offers the built-in security, redundancy, and compute power to stay productive when entire teams are working remotely.

Since implementing the cloud DaaS solution, we rarely hear from the firm. The support issues that were largely caused by the on-premises VPN model just don’t happen anymore. Their team can concentrate on getting work done.

Keep in mind that the resources our customers receive by moving to the cloud are typically far more than they’ll need. That said, if your business grows and you need more RAM or more processors, we can add them on the fly. You can add or remove users as needed. This firm can add resources during tax season and scale back down when those resources are no longer needed.

With a physical on-premises IT environment, you would have to buy a new server and rebuild the network if you want to add resources. You would also have to purchase enough resources and capacity to account for peak demand, which would then go unused during non-peak times.

Another major advantage of the cloud is a simple, predictable pricing model. You receive access to all your applications, antivirus, spam filter, remote and onsite support, cloud desktop hosting, and licensing as part of an integrated, fully managed solution. You receive this solution for a single, per-user price each month.

The solution we implemented kept the costs the same as what they were paying for their on-premises solution. However, they don’t have to manage technology. They don’t have to worry about the capital expense of an infrastructure refresh down the road. They don’t need to hire an IT manager because the cloud environment is managed, maintained, and supported as part of their per-user cost.

Closing Thoughts

The firm we’ve referenced in this article understands that remote working is not going anywhere, even when we have a vaccine. They’ve seen how productive their team can be when they have the right solution to support a remote workforce.

With our cloud-based DaaS solution, businesses with 20, 50, 100 or more users get:

• Better performance and reliability
• Built-in security and data protection
• The same user experience and desktop environment from any location
• Access to all business applications and files
• Simple, predictable, per-user pricing as an operational expense
• Remote and onsite support

The fact is, the cloud was designed to support a remote workforce. VPN was not. Let us help your company move to a modern DaaS solution.
Want to learn how your company can use DaaS and the cloud to become more productive when working remotely? Schedule a free, no-obligation demo today! Call Jim Brennan at 609-790-4215 or email jim@managedservicesit.com.