The post-pandemic uncertainties and technology disruptions have reshaped the way work gets done. As hybrid work arrangements become increasingly common, enterprises face pressing challenges, including risk management with a remote workforce, changing cyber threat landscape, and rising environmental sustainability regulations. With these changing requirements and expectations, enterprises must adopt a new approach to modernize workplaces.
This new approach would incorporate three interconnected dimensions for your modernization journey: end-to-end device life cycle, built-in security, and enhanced digital and sustainability experience. The Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) model allows enterprises to focus on these three crucial dimensions to build a modern, flexible and responsive workplace.
In addition, it simplifies and optimizes IT costs by shifting your efforts from device management to value creation. Powered by a DaaS model, this new approach helps, organizations can achieve a workspace with greater agility, flexibility, digital resilience and user-centricity to thrive in this changing digital era.
In this two-part blog series, I will shed some light on the benefits of DaaS and the essential factors that you should consider while shifting to it. Read on.
Demystifying DaaS
Modern-day Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) models integrate end-user devices, infrastructure operations, enterprise applications, security, compliance and sustainability. These models allow you to outsource the management of IT devices to a third-party vendor that handles the entire device life cycle, from provisioning to deployment, maintenance and refurbishment. By subscribing to a DaaS provider, you can enjoy benefits such as access to the most secure and up-to-date IT devices, faster onboarding of employees and reduced carbon footprint.
As employees need to be innovative and make their jobs more satisfying, these interlinked factors drive the DaaS model adoption. Additionally, several IT departments want to hand off IT device management to others—not only because it is difficult and complex to find in-house talent to handle this chore, but also because they want to unburden their existing IT talent from mundane tasks.
DaaS can help achieve both goals simultaneously. It can enable your IT department to operate at a higher level and provide your management with the resources and capabilities to take advantage of digital transformation, AI and other emerging technologies. As an organizational uniter that increases workforce satisfaction, DaaS is certainly taking hold in the hybrid workplace scenario.
Value Proposition of DaaS
By definition, DaaS resembles an extension of the traditional leasing model. However, a traditional leasing model works only as a financial construct that companies pay for the hardware usage. The relationship extends beyond a financial construct if a single vendor manages the entire device life cycle, including hardware supply, managed services and priority support.
The DaaS model offers enterprises enhanced data control, enabling smart decision-making in the evolving digital landscape.
Instead, DaaS serves as a ramification for your organization's operations, IT infrastructure and workforce. In traditional leasing models, each step, from device deployment to its resale, can be isolated. The DaaS model makes the process seamless for employees and enables you to focus on shared goals rather than device management. For this reason, DaaS facilitates several value propositions, including:
Boosting Employee Experience
With the ability to facilitate faster provisioning, enhanced support applications, and data access for the geographically dispersed workforce, DaaS enables employees to work from anywhere at the highest level. This increases productivity and facilitates a better work-life balance for employees. Furthermore, DaaS offers a secure digital workspace using a mix of platform-driven management, device analytics, and automation to eliminate the need for expensive hardware upgrades or maintenance costs while ensuring the safety of company data. It also elevates employee experience, which has become one of the most crucial factors in attracting and retaining talent today. According to a survey, improving the employee experience was the top goal for nearly half of the 1500 surveyed IT decision-makers when implementing DaaS.
Closing Security Gaps
With ever emerging threat landscape, organizations need help to keep pace with the security measures required to protect remote work systems and data. A US data breach report shows a 17% rise in data breaches between 2020 to 2021 as working from home culture became standard. The DaaS model can enable organizations to tackle these data breaches and close the security gaps through encryption, automated security and policy updates, integrated device management, device security, and compliance. Furthermore, with dedicated teams focusing solely on maintaining strong cybersecurity practices, organizations can be assured that they will always have access to the latest safeguards without investing significant resources into building their internal IT infrastructure. The net result is a highly secure environment allowing greater operational efficiency while minimizing risk exposure.
Improving Sustainability
The pandemic has pushed organizations towards digital adoption. The hybrid model helps reduce carbon emissions by facilitating collaborative tools and digital resources to employees at remote locations. However, the growth of remote working environments has increased device manufacturing, raising the lifetime carbon emissions from IT devices in the manufacturing process and supply chain.
Carbon emissions produced by an average laptop, which stands at 331kgs - nearly as much as a family car driving 480 miles. These devices must be managed and disposed of properly during their lifecycle. The maintenance of these remote IT devices calls for regular off-site service visits by technicians, which might add to the carbon costs of remote work and piling e-waste. DaaS addresses these critical issues by extending the device lifecycle, promoting the second use of devices, and supporting work from home to support environmental sustainability.
Conclusion
Over the years, the increasing reliance on technology to drive growth and innovation has increased multiple times. As a result, traditional IT models need to be updated and made more efficient. Scalability is particularly relevant, as businesses must quickly adapt to altering market conditions and customer needs while maintaining high levels of performance and security.
By leveraging the DaaS model, you can achieve greater scalability without worrying about hardware maintenance, security and upgrades. Additionally, DaaS offers numerous other benefits such as enhanced data access and mobility, which can help you improve productivity and collaboration across teams.
Therefore, it’s important to plan a smooth transition towards DaaS sooner rather than later, so that you can stay competitive in today’s digital workplace era.
