End-user device procurement, management, and maintenance continue to present challenges to organizations due to the time, cost, and complexity.
With the change in work styles brought about by the pandemic, organizations have been forced into adopting cloud services and seeking secure edge devices at the same time as global chip shortages, and CAPEX pressures are squeezing their budgets.
Overstretched IT, departments have a myriad of issues to deal with when supporting device growth. Sixty-three per cent of IT Managers say device management drains their resources, and they wish they could focus on more strategic IT projects.
There’s, thankfully, a simple solution.
A device as a service model uses a flexible approach to provisioning, servicing, and supporting fleets of devices with a predictable monthly cost.
A device as a service consists of procurement of a modern device (tablet, laptop, desktop, printer, and even mobile) from preferred vendors, which is bundled with your choice of services, including deployment and management services, analytics, and security, and eventual lifecycle management.
Each company pays a consistent charge per Device for a set period, typically for three years.
PC-as-a-Service (PAAS) or Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) may be confusing to many people.
You’re not alone.
Globally dispersed teams will need innovative hardware tools to do their best work in the future. That’s the next great challenge.
For their IT infrastructure and hardware needs, organization leaders sought Managed Services providers during the 2000s and 2010s.
Teams thrive on outsourcing the supply of their technological equipment instead of buying, maintaining, and fixing individual devices for each member.
Those trends haven’t abated. Rather than relying on break-fix models, teams can now access cutting edge hardware faster and at a lower cost by shifting away from old models. A digitally transformed workplace has led to further evolution of the trend.
DaaS is a device as a service that fundamentally changes how teams complete projects from beginning to end.
DaaS vs. Managed Services: The Difference
Through a Managed Services agreement, teams essentially rent their technology equipment from a knowledgeable third party, allowing them to avoid maintenance and upgrade costs usually associated with significant technology investments.
It gives the user access to the most productive power of the latest technology without owning it—similar to leasing a vehicle.
Despite this, navigating the digital transformation era effectively isn’t as easy as driving to work. The leased vehicle will handle virtually all the driver’s transportation needs during the term of the lease.
In the meantime, team members, both technical and non-technical, are managing increasingly complex digital tasks. The number of Internet-connected devices has more than doubled over the past five years.
You can now manage projects on tablets, smartphones, PCs, and more, whether you’re in an office or remote. That’s those leases add up, and every new Device entails an increased risk of extra expenses without an equal benefit.
With DaaS, organizations move away from long-term rental agreements and focus more on monthly leasing. Modern organizations’ flexible needs-based device management model offers several critical advantages over the traditional method of obtaining technology.
DaaS Across Your Organizational Department
Organizations that implement DaaS are able to experience productivity gains and work-from-anywhere flexibility. Depending on each team’s responsibilities, these benefits vary in some unique ways as well.
A significant advantage is for IT departments that have been chronically burdened by backlogs of projects to be completed. Troubleshooting issues across an organization consumes time and resources for technical staff.
Due to the support model of these DaaS service providers, users can streamline their helpdesk requests.
Now, IT experts can devote more time to tasks crucial to a company’s operations and profitability while the internal staff is no longer forced to handle technical support.
Mainly since DaaS provides greater visibility into device usage, businesses may begin with business intelligence.
A DaaS service package includes dashboards that provide helpful information on outages, device locations, software installations, and more.
Using this information, the IT team can increase the quality of their operations, make valuable changes to their service packages, and plan a more sustainable long-term strategy for sustaining higher growth.
Similarly, Human Resources personnel can benefit as well. The employee portal gets used to requesting new devices, allowing automation to do the repetitive work while HR focuses on its most significant responsibilities.
An all-inclusive DaaS model gives accounting teams a clearer picture of cost, giving leadership a better way to make financial decisions across the company.
DaaS: the key to the future
DaaS implementations are often hindered by inertia in an organization. Although this is expected, resistance to change can squander money and time when a sunk cost of sticking with an outdated device management model is incurred.
Nevertheless, things are changing year over year, not just in organizations known for their technical expertise.
Over 500,000 Census Bureau contractors received mobile devices for the 2020 census, the largest DaaS deployment in the federal government’s history.
Compared to previous methods, productivity increased by 50%, and government bureaucracies could use this service model.
The Cloud as a Service technology stacks of each organization will look, operate, and function differently.
With device subscriptions, you can customize your devices to meet your specific needs for a long time. Likewise, with Managed Services, we saw how a flexible and dispersed workforce could work. With DaaS, teams can go to the next level of scalable productivity.
DaaS: Now is the time to make your move
During the COVID-19 period, IT professionals contributed to every sector of the economy during the COVID-19 period, including small businesses and large corporations.
We witnessed a sudden imperative to completely transform service delivery – overnight – at a time when the change was already occurring at an unprecedented rate.
Organizations should now fully appreciate how strong IT teams are if they didn’t before.
While IT workers may feel they have barely had a chance to breathe, the complexity and volume of devices are not slowing down, quite the opposite.
Almost every IT manager we have met so far wants to turn day-to-day fleet management over to another person so they can focus on more critical tasks.
Despite Device as a Service (DaaS) since 2015, rapid changes in work habits coupled with technological advancements have made DaaS more prevalent. Many factors contribute to this, including the reduction of IT team workloads.
An economy based on subscriptions
Throughout the past decade, the way we purchase products has changed dramatically. The ‘subscription economy’ includes streaming services, ride-hailing apps, and cloud storage services.
Before the pandemic hit, subscription models gained traction, but they picked up steam in the past 18 months.
One of the primary attractants of outsourcing is the ability to swap out monolithic blocks of capital expenditure (CAPEX) for predictable monthly payments – operational expenditure (OPEX).
As an alternative to the traditional IT acquisition cycle’s rollercoaster ride, our move from CAPEX to OPEX relieves cash flow and allows us to concentrate on other initiatives.
IT resources are also freed up from the paperwork associated with CAPEX and can sign off on recurring invoices that go to the accounts department for payment instead.
Conclusion
Your organization’s operating model needs to be changed. The transition from CAPEX to OPEX needs to take place. NSW IT Support has been providing end-user support services.
Our process for evaluating managed services in Australia provides us with an accurate cost per seat.
As a result, we strongly recommend that our clients be empowered instead of tangled up. Regardless of the project size, we work with you to improve your customer experience as a hybrid delivery partner. Get in touch!
