Digital transformation is becoming increasingly relevant for businesses to stay ahead of the curve and competition. This transformation not only involves the automation of business processes, but digitizing the workplace as well. In today's work climate, much of the workforce has transitioned to remote work and are additionally spread across various locations and time zones. This is where digital transformation comes into play to enhance the way business gets done. 

Unfortunately, conventional desktop solutions, such as virtual desktop infrastructure, will not be able to scale to the distributed and dynamically varying workforce. This is where the need for a cloud-based Desktop-as-Service solution comes in. AWS is one of the leading cloud service providers that offers the most scalable DaaS solutions in the form of AWS WorkSpaces.

What is DaaS?

As defined by VMWare, Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud computing offering where a service provider delivers virtual desktops to end-users over the internet, licensed with a per-user subscription. DaaS offers some clear advantages over a traditional desktop model. Deploying or decommissioning active end users with DaaS is much faster and less expensive. 

Benefits of AWS as a DaaS

Effective IT Infrastructure Management

AWS has 66 availability Zones within 21 geographic regions and provides a strong cloud infrastructure ecosystem offering scalable cloud infrastructure services. This is what makes AWS a strong IaaS cloud solution provider. Being an IaaS cloud provider, AWS offers seamless infrastructure support to DaaS users. Amazon WorkSpace eases access to consistent and higher computational performance desktops anywhere to the workforce.

Amazon WorkSpace aids to eliminate numerous administrative tasks related to the management of desktop lifecycle tasks, which includes provisioning, deploying, performing timely updates and other maintenance activities. Using the AWS console, IT teams can easily perform any number of workspace deployments globally and manage them effectively as needed.

Solid Security

With a distributed workforce, data and applications are accessed across multiple devices, thereby introducing a big challenge of ensuring security for enterprise data. Looking at the scale at which cyber attacks are happening, having a solid security infrastructure is an expensive thing, be it for SMBs or large-scale enterprises. AWS offers Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help facilitate secured access to resources. This feature permits IT teams to define users and groups so that they can deliver identity and access permissions to ensure security.

Scalable Usage Experiences Globally

AWS WorkSpaces implemented in the VPN will ensure authenticated and secured access through mechanisms like digital certificates and Key Management Service. The PC-over-IP remote display protocol offers better user experience across any device and network globally, with secured access to data resting in AWS Cloud. This way, businesses can save costs on obtaining high computation competencies.

Multi-Channel and Multi-Device Support

Amazon WorkSpaces offers consistent enterprise services to users across multiple devices, operating systems, platforms and browsers. The experiences are tailored according to the platform used to improve services. Users can install Amazon WorkSpaces as per the instructions provided to them and download the client applications needed.

Strong Storage Facility

Based on the storage plans selected, Amazon WorkSpaces provides each user with dedicated cloud storage space with an automatic backup facility by Amazon S3. S3 provides an easy-to-use secured interface to store and retrieve any amount of data at any given time and device. The beauty of this service is multiple users can read or write data simultaneously with the appropriate authentication.

Apart from S3, Amazon WorkSpaces also provides Amazon WorkDocs Drive storage mechanism. Users can mount this drive to store or retrieve data with ease. Whatever data stored in the Amazon WorkDocs Drive automatically reflected in Amazon WorkDocs through an encrypted connection, wherein this data can be accessed anywhere or any device by authorized users or groups.