If your business is considering enabling remote work, Bring Your Own Device or looking to easily provision, update and secure your users with DaaS or a virtual workspace you’re not alone. In fact, according to Gartner, DaaS momentum continues to build – especially in the midmarket. 

To help businesses think through some of the major considerations we developed a comparison guide that outlines: 

• How projects get funded 
• Major solution types 
• Key questions to consider
• A cost evaluation process
• Thoughts on overcoming objections 

So, why would should listen to us? Well, Evolve IP… 

• Has been providing DaaS solutions for over 11 years 
• Is the largest multi-tenant VMware DaaS provider in the United States.  
• Our solution has been named in every Gartner DaaS Market Guide since inception.  
• We also work with Citrix and have deployed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for clients. 
• We have tens of thousands of users 

Bottom line, we have a lot of experience to pull from for this comparison. 

Today we will look at the number one question / consideration we hear … What is the Total Cost of Ownership of Desktop-as-a-Service / DaaS?  

If you’ve read any of our previous posts you’ll understand why this question / consideration is the equivalent of an online mic drop! Why? It might have been some twisted joke from our Product team, but in this case better is significantly cheaper.  

Looking at DaaS, for almost every provider the pricing model is the same.  You buy a seat, then you outfit the seat with the ancillary parts and pieces needed to actually make the desktop work.  The typical seat itemization would include: 

1. RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) – this is a tool used to manage desktops.  In our case, we use N-Able.  However, we also allow customers to bring their own solutions to the table and re-use them in our cloud. 
2. Anti-Virus – In today’s environment you had better protect those devices.  We utilize Trend AV or allow our customers to bring their own solutions. 
3. Operating System – Pretty straight forward.  Again, if customers have their own Office 365 OS they can bring that along. 
4. Patching – This is not a requirement, but more and more clients are asking us to apply Windows, 3rd party and AV patches/updates.  We think this is great move because there is ZERO value to the business handling this exercise and you are paying an IT professional WAY too much for such a mundane chore.  Not to mention we’ve never found anyone in IT that wakes up thinking, “I can’t wait to patch my desktops today.” (If this is you, put down the whitepaper and call someone for help!) 

So, how does a typical DaaS solution compare to Workspaces? Here’s a list price comparison. 

Remember when we talked about the 3 user types?  This is when it really hits home.  In the DaaS world, every user is $89.  However, with Workspaces, users are matched with just the tools they need; drastically reducing your overall TCO!   

Here is an example of what Evolve IP Workspaces looks like with 450 users compared to a 100% DaaS solution.