Two key trends – “bring your own device” (BYOD) and the virtual desktop infrastructure – are converging to create compelling opportunities for efficiency, convenience, usability, and cost-savings.

In the following blog post – adapted from a podcast with Enterprise Management 360 – Navisite’s Chris Patterson, vice president of product management, discusses the implications.

Historically IT has focused on owning, provisioning, installing, updating, and managing individual devices such as corporate PCs and mobile devices. IT typically installs all kind of agents and security controls to secure them. But now we see employees bringing in their own iPads, phones, and other mobile devices. That’s a big shift because IT no longer owns or manages those devices. And IT has realized it needs to start embracing all of these devices and work out ways to keep enterprise data secure.

The biggest shift in this is really cultural. IT is no longer the gatekeeper saying, “No, you can’t have that device.” IT now has to start looking at how they will allow those devices – and that means policies and processes.

For instance, previously, if something went wrong with a corporate-owned device, such as a BlackBerry, you simply wiped out the data on that device. But don’t try that with a “BYOD” device – you’d be wiping out an employee’s personal photos and videos, and non-work-related apps.

Instead, IT departments are looking at the data and their applications and figuring out how to keep that data from ever leaving the data center. That’s where desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) enters the picture.

Security Matters, Too

Data center operators have invested an awful lot of time, energy, and money into ensuring the data is secure using controls that you could never put in place around an iPad or a laptop hard drive.

With a virtual desktop, all data stays in that data center – protected by cameras, security guards, and backup generators. If the employee leaves the company, the account is simply disabled and he can no longer get to that protected data. More importantly, if the employee loses her iPad, for instance, the protected data is not on that missing iPad. It remains safely secured using the controls in place at the data center.

From a compliance perspective, that’s a major advantage. DaaS is embraced warmly by security teams when they realize that they can keep all the data centralized and behind firewalls, behind the SSAE16, HIPAA, or other controls that they have implemented. It takes out much of the risk while still allowing users to have much more flexibility. Key Use Cases Early implementations of this DaaS/BYOD model have focused on simpler applications like call centers or in healthcare, where they’re running a few clearly defined applications and don’t need a complex desktop. As they gain familiarity and comfort, they see that the response time is as good as that of a local PC – and sometimes better. That’s when they want to move into more complex environments.

We’ve also seen a lot of adoption from people who work remotely. For instance, a company might be based in one part of the country and want to hire contract programmers who are thousands of miles away. They don’t want to provision all those PCs or manage all those desktops from that distance. At the same time, they don’t want to provide contract programmers with unfettered network access. DaaS is a great way of bridging that gap. DaaS can present to the contract programmers a virtual desktop with the needed tools and access only to the required data. They can also disable USB ports, CD-ROM drives, clipboards, and even printing ability to prevent removal of any data.

And DaaS is also getting a lot of traction in disaster recovery scenarios. Companies can replicate their databases and servers and restore them within a certain number of hours to get them back up and running. DaaS is very popular in these instances because not only can they restore their data center, they can use a “golden image” of their core applications to that employees can use to access from home over consumer broadband.

So no matter how you look at it, either from a security perspective or from the multitude of use cases it applies to, a desktop-as-a-service solution is worth considering.

Read more in our quick tips 10 Things You Need to Know About Desktop-as-a-Service or watch a demo of our DaaS platform.