Deploy Secure and Compliant Virtual Environments with Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

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What is Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)?

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud computing offering where a service provider delivers virtual applications and desktops to end users via any device. When a business enlists DaaS from a technology partner, they can make their business perform more efficiently, cut costs and boost their security dynamic. Since the provider has already managed upfront expenses, the end is solely responsible for the low monthly costs of the service. Typically, DaaS providers handle storing user data, as well as upgrades for the service and supported applications. The popularity of DaaS is increasing steadily on a global scale and is estimated to reach a revenue of $2.6 billion by 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 58.8%1.

How Does DaaS Differ From VDI?

At its core, DaaS is a VDI that is hosted in the cloud by a third-party provider. With DaaS, the hardware is managed by the provider, so internal teams aren’t responsible for managing rackspace, hardware breakdown, or maintenance.

Organizations can typically get DaaS deployments running in minimal time, whereas VDI deployments can often take longer to implement. This is because the infrastructure and platform are already configured within a DaaS environment; users simply need to define desktop settings and users. Scaling with DaaS services only involves requesting additional desktop instances or user licenses, saving both money and time by not preparing new hardware.

What are the Benefits of DaaS?

As companies continue to work remotely due to COVID-19, there is an opportunity to re-invent the physical workplace and provide employees with an aspect of predictability that virtualization offers. In fact, a survey of a representative sample of American workers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that 43.6% were able to telework. Modernizing the workplace is a necessity in order to maintain a productive work environment and promote employee safety. In order to manage remote workforces using DaaS, teams can utilize the following benefits to improve their current ways of working with respect to market forces.

Cost​

DaaS moves costs from CAPEX to OPEX, leaving organizations with more readily available cash flow to optimize the business. Per desktop pricing enables teams to know exactly what workforce expansion will cost the IT department, removing unforeseen infrastructure or hardware purchases. These purchases are handled by the provider, who bundles everything in with the price of each desktop.

Additionally, users who are entirely office-based can be switched onto low maintenance zero clients which have no local OS or storage. Organizations can also instill a bring your own device (BYOD) policy, where staff are expected to use personal hardware to access corporate resources, particularly useful in the era of remote working.

Security

One laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, and nearly 41% of all data breach events from 2005 through 2015 were caused by lost devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. With COVID-19 still posing a significant threat, it is likely that the majority of workforces are still working from home, with new staff members joining without ever stepping foot into a company building. This also means IT teams are spending too much time organization the shipping of laptops to those new staff members. DaaS moves the security risk from hundreds of end-user devices and puts it all into the controlled and managed environment of a data center. Lost or stolen laptops no longer provide a security risk and there is no data on the local machine. As DaaS removes the need to create VPNs to access applications and data held by the company, it also removes the problem of users trying to bypass security setups.

Scalability

The as-a-service delivery model of DaaS enables teams to add user workstations fast and easily. This is particularly helpful when organizations utilize contract resources or temporary project teams, as there’s no hardware to procure, allowing flexibility to create a desktop almost instantly and delete it when no longer required.

DaaS moves the security risk from hundreds of end-user devices and puts it all into the controlled and managed environment of a data center. Lost or stolen laptops no longer provide a security risk and there is no data on the local machine. As DaaS removes the need to create VPNs to access applications and data held by the company, it also removes the problem of users trying to bypass security setups. 


What are the Challenges of DaaS?

Traditional DaaS and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, while well established, can’t defend against a growing number of threats to a business and its corporate systems. The DaaS platform struggles in the realm of security and accessibility. These incompetent areas are particularly inconvenient now, during the current remote work explosion, when companies must onboard remote team members quickly, securely, and compliantly without fussing with dozens of manual operations and configurations.

From outside hackers to internal human error, to compliance issues brought on by ballooning data velocities and increased regulations, DaaS can’t keep up with the modern workplace. Major challenges include:

Safety and security concerns

Traditional DaaS solutions tend to assume everything inside an organization’s network is trustworthy, but sophisticated cyber attackers and insider threats clearly show this is not the case. Without built in security and compliance controls, many DaaS providers open themselves up to a variety of potential attacks.

Management complexity

Many DaaS solutions still require that customers manage their own images, applications and security, which can be a complex process requiring multiple team members.


What are Examples of Daas Use Cases?

There are a number of use cases that are uniquely suited for DaaS, including:

Avoid IT infrastructure and employee laptop management

DaaS solutions use secured and isolated end-user compute environments conforming to corporate image policies, without incurring delays to start dates without incurring the time and costs associated with infrastructure purchase, configuration, shipping and complicated vendor tool integrations.

BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE (BYOD)​

DaaS is an ideal solution for environments that allow or require employees to use their own devices. Teams can focus on a secure connection so that anything on these devices will not translate back to the desktop instances in the data center. Employees can bring in any device and get the company approved desktop on all of them.

Business continuity

In today’s fast paced business environment and ever-changing global risks, organizations need to find solutions that can quickly respond to geo-political changes like adverse weather disasters and pandemics. DaaS solutions allow businesses to quickly scale and enable teams to work remotely from anywhere in the world.


Discover the Capabilities of Tehama’s On-Demand Daas Platform

Tehama’s DaaS solution eliminates endpoint security concerns while simplifying and speeding up the provisioning of a global workforce. Tehama acts as a virtual office as a service built to facilitate the next stage of digital transformation; the secure and compliant deployment of a massive remote workforce, not confined to traditional office spaces or even geographies, but without the problems consistently plaguing DaaS and VDI as mentioned above. Benefits of partnering with Tehama include:

Onboard global teams in 60 minutes

Onboarding global teams using traditional DaaS can take weeks, while onboarding a new vendor can take up to six to nine months – an unacceptable delay in today’s business climate. That’s why Tehama is optimized for single-click provisioning of custom workspaces, allowing easy onboarding and offboarding with a complete audit trail of who proposed, approved, rejected, or removed any member of the Tehama Room.

Tehama Rooms can also support and fully audit multiple organizations collaborating within a single workspace, along with High Performance Compute (HPC) use cases for engineers and data scientists.

Enterprise-level security

Each Tehama Virtual Room provides secure remote access through always-on automated encryption, secure perimeters, least privilege permissions and zero-trust network isolation. File vaults within each Room allow users to easily share files that are continuously scanned for viruses or malware, while providing complete control over upload or download of files within a Room.

Each Tehama Room also contains a secrets vault, which can store privileged credentials with password obfuscation while also providing dynamic credentials, expiring passwords, and firewalls in real time. Tehama’s network isolation ensures ports open only for validated, credentialed users, and that users can only access certain systems granted under the Room’s policy or work mandate. To guard against data loss, outside access to the general Internet can also be restricted. It’s all complemented by a full audit trail (just like everything else that goes on within a Tehama Virtual Room).

Built-in compliance

Tehama includes built-in SOC 2 Type II compliance controls, is audited and certified by Deloitte every six months, and rotates penetration testers every quarter. Administrators can apply policies to each Tehama Room to restrict access based on geography or employee permissions, or require a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before gaining access. And thanks to Tehama’s airtight auditing tools, policy adherence and changes are automatically tracked in the platform’s compliance audit logs.

Contextual forensic auditing

Everything that happens in every Tehama Room – including when and by whom it was created; which users have logged in, when, and for how long; how many sessions or login attempts have been made; or who has accessed which files – is logged in an activity stream timeline. It’s also recorded. That means every Tehama Room is perfectly witnessed in real time through these logs and recordings, providing hard evidence for regulators or auditors looking to prove compliance to requirements or investigators performing vital research.

Looking to the Future with Tehama

Tehama adds a level of predictability with cloud infrastructure, virtual rooms and virtual desktops, getting remote employees online almost immediately. Tehama addresses highest-level security and compliance issues from the outset, rather than as an add-on or afterthought, with built-in SOC 2 Type II controls. These controls significantly reduce the risk of malware intrusion into corporate networks from remote devices and eliminates the potential of privileged credential theft and lateral network movement associated with VPN access.

Connect with Tehama to learn how Tehama’s solutions can benefit the health of your organization. Contact us today and begin building a secure, sustainable remote workforce that scales – in minutes, not months.

  1. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3970376/forecast-analysis-desktop-as-a-service-worldwide

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