Managing Cost and Complexity out of Desktop Management A practical six-point plan to realising the business and technology benefits of Desktop as a Service
Introduction With the increasing pressures on businesses to deliver more services to more people in more ways, now is the right time to reappraise how they manage the desktop. The time-honoured manual approach to administration, lifecycle management and support is proving too costly and timeconsuming to sustain. Even with falling hardware prices, desktop management can account for between 25% and 40% of the IT budget. That s hard to justify, and detracts from the work that IT wants and needs to do, supporting business growth and innovation. The challenge is that IT is facing evergrowing demand from users to access their business applications from their choice of smart devices, as well as laptops and PCs. They re not just demanding access in the office. Employees on the move and working remotely want the same level of service as those onsite. Because service and applications availability translates into employee satisfaction and productivity, it s in the business interests to meet those demands. desktop. New technologies including desktop virtualisation and cloud delivery are maturing to such an extent that CIOs have an opportunity to re-design service delivery models completely to improve delivery and access from a range of devices in a secure and controlled manner. Mid- to large-sized UK enterprises therefore have a real business need and a clear technology opportunity to find simpler and more efficient approaches to desktop management that also improve end users productivity and effectiveness. This paper considers where the pressures are building on desktop management, and how new service delivery models can help to provide service where it s needed with controlled costs. To help, we offer a practical six-point plan to determining what your business needs and how to achieve it, with the right delivery model and the right partner. There are solutions. An experienced and specialised IT service delivery partner has the skills to take over responsibility for some or all of an organisation s desktop services - from traditional break/fix and asset management to a complete managed
The Changing Face of Desktop Management Businesses can expend extraordinary effort and hours on desktop management. It s not just about the devices that employees use though that itself is a growing issue. It s about purchasing and refreshing the PCs, laptops and mobiles. It s about the time consumed in managing and maintaining printers, and the effort involved in updating operating and application software - antivirus, OS patching, application updates and upgrades - and tracking licences. Even with hardware, software and networks primed and working, organisations must be constantly vigilant in addressing data protection, security and compliance, and all within budget constraints. The lower costs vs growth dilemma Technology s role in supporting organisational innovation and improving the customer experience may be growing, but most IT budgets aren t being increased to match the change in demand. Most are reported to be reducing. It s yet another challenge for CIOs and their teams. Failing economies have depressed business and budgets. Available resources are focused on maintaining business as usual. But as the economy recovers, enterprises will need to be ready and waiting to deliver an excellent customer experience for all or risk losing out to competitors. That means budget has to be managed effectively to maintain the status quo and develop and deliver new and more efficient services. Complexity in consumerisation of IT The massive popularity of the iphone and the ipad, as well as the rising star of the Android OS, is blurring the divisions between work and home, as well as the journey in-between. From the boardroom down, people know it s theoretically possible to access business applications and services from a huge range of smart devices wherever they are. Today, employees are regularly claiming to use two if not three devices for work, including PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones. Social media and instant messaging are breaking down the barriers between work and personal use. Sometimes the devices are supplied by the business. In other cases staff prefer to use the state-of-the-art technology they buy as consumers to the ageing and slow technology on their desks. This rapidly evolving variety of access devices comes with a price. Not only do the devices and operating software have to be supported, but their use also raises obvious questions of security and governance where devices are regularly being used outside the office or are not corporately owned. Savvy organisations are even looking at how they can capitalise on these new ways of working to take the business forward. The bottom line, as ever, is that IT needs to create new ways to support business growth and innovation while containing costs. That means evaluating new service delivery models that promise lower costs and lower resource requirements.
The Changing Face of Desktop Management Platforms and protocols to support end-user mobility With business becoming increasingly global, more people are travelling further and more frequently. Technology is enabling greater productivity as employees work on the move and remotely. Enforced attendance at a single location five days a week has virtually disappeared for many occupations. This end-user mobility again has implications for IT, which must deliver secure access to business applications for employees wherever they are. Increasingly IT needs to support multiple platforms through multiple protocols, while protecting corporate data. At the same time, supporting mobile and home workers means extending many inhouse IT functions beyond the traditional barriers of 9-5, Monday to Friday. The way forward While cost concerns, IT consumerisation and mobility are piling pressure on the IT function to the extent that desktop management is calculated to cost ten times more than purchase cost there are new approaches to delivery that can greatly ease the pressures and control costs. New models of service delivery offer more choice and flexibility in how you can utilise budget and resources, while virtualisation technologies address the key issues of security, availability and cost for both the mobile and desk-based user. Sophistication of existing outsourcing models It s no longer a de facto requirement for IT to own and manage all its own infrastructure. Experienced, specialised partners can assume management responsibility for your desktop assets through their lifecycle, or at the other end of the spectrum, provide a fully managed model covering hardware, software and support. At the same time, monitoring, diagnostic, inventory management and other support tools are sufficiently advanced that they can help to identify and resolve issues before they affect operations and incur costs. Budgets can be controlled more effectively and predictably as more flexible financial models are introduced. Managed services can be delivered at a fixed cost per seat and to agreed service levels. Beyond that it is possible for service delivery partners to take ownership of your desktop assets and lease them back to your business, releasing capital funds for further investment. New virtualisation and cloud technologies offer services completely delivered and managed securely from a partner s data centre. Maturity of key emerging technologies The virtualisation of desktops, servers, storage and networking is becoming mainstream, and companies are increasingly realising the benefit of IT services in the cloud especially for their users.
The Changing Face of Desktop Management Concerns around storing data and applications outside the organisation are fading as these new technologies become established and prove their credentials as secure and resilient ways to achieve greater availability and flexibility at more predictable cost. Virtualisation is offering the solution to delivering a useful range of business applications securely to users on the move. In addition, it is a cost-effective alternative to refreshing static PCs in the office. These two evolutions greater flexibility in service delivery and the move to virtualisation offer IT a way forward in meeting business requirements and the user demands of today and into the future. This paper explains how an experienced and specialised IT service delivery partner can help you meet these challenges by taking responsibility for some or all of your desktop services. Desktop as a Service builds on the partner s breadth of knowledge and skills as well as new technologies to offer you a wide range of service delivery options - from traditional break/fix and asset management to a complete managed desktop.
The Desktop as a Service Continuum Businesses can call upon trusted partners to deliver a wide range of desktop services with a choice of financial models. For greater clarity, we ve created a continuum to demonstrate how different services deliver different benefits. The further up the scale that a business moves, the greater the benefits in terms of reduced cost and complexity. For those who wish to maintain ownership of their assets, the graphic shows the Desktop as a Service continuum. At the lower level, the partner takes over the management of the business desktop assets. Further up the scale, deskside support services see the partner providing user and infrastructure issue resolution, while the service desk provides remote support. A fully managed service, or outsourcing, sees the partner take full responsibility for the desktop service Desktop as a Service Continuum Reduced Cost and Complexity Fully Managed Service Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Deskside Support Services Asset Management Services Service Desks Level of Outsourcing
The Desktop as a Service Continuum lifecycle procurement, installation, monitoring and management for your hardware, software and networks. This is not the only option. You can choose to hand over ownership as well as control of your assets to your partner, or let your partner deliver all your services from its own data centres through desktop virtualisation or the cloud. This approach transforms service delivery into a pay-per-user model, where services are treated as a utility and businesses only pay for what they use. Fixed TCO with Asset Management Services With a service delivery partner taking control of the management overheads of IT assets - and the associated risks of market fluctuations your business can benefit from a fixed TCO for budgeting and planning. Your chosen partner takes care of essential infrastructure upgrades, changes and refreshes, ensuring an upto-date and fit-for-purpose hardware and software infrastructure. They time capital expenditure for greatest costeffectiveness and deliver to industryrecognised standards such as PRINCE 2. Quality of delivery is assured if the partner s service framework is aligned to ITIL and operates to ISO best practice for deploying and managing assets. With the asset lifecycle and day-today management now handled by your partner, you can release inhouse IT staff and resources to focus on strategic work. Deskside Support Services To control costs and release resources from day-to-day tasks further, you can hand over responsibility for onsite user and infrastructure support to your partner. By removing support bottlenecks you can improve user productivity and satisfaction. At the same time you gain access to accredited IT skills delivering against industry best practices particularly useful for businesses with scarce inhouse skills or dynamically changing requirements. Deskside support services can be entirely tailored to your specific needs, hours of cover and skill sets. They can be delivered as a dedicated onsite resource or by a team of field-based engineers with response-tosite and resolution service level targets. This service complements the remote support provided by the service desk. Service Desk The service desk provides remote support and a single point of contact for all users. For the highest level of service, you can opt for a dedicated service desk where the highly trained analysts focus solely on your users and systems. If greater cost-efficiency is more important, then a virtual service desk provides access to the same quality of technical support, but shared with other organisations. Incidents (faults) can often be resolved remotely without the need for a physical site visit. If the partner operates a web portal for its service desk, your users will have visibility on activity. Service desks can take responsibility for activities such as remote monitoring, incident management, service request fulfilment, third-party management and asset management. Combining both the service desk and deskside support services provides the right skills and best practice for resolving incidents quickly and efficiently.
The Desktop as a Service Continuum Fully Managed Service Moving to a fully managed service model provides a true step-change in cost reduction, and frees internal resources completely to focus on value-add initiatives that will enable the business to move forward. In this situation the partner takes entire responsibility for operation and administration of the desktop asset sourcing, licensing management, lifecycle management, asset maintenance, desktop support and service desk and with guaranteed service levels. Desktop infrastructure management is not the end of the story. The partner may introduce new technologies that will help to deliver on business objectives in the long term. Technologies such as cloud and virtualisation not only promise new levels of service, but establish pay-as-you-go models that deliver advanced technology without further capital investment from your business. As you migrate to these new services, you can reach a point where you no longer own the infrastructure or resources behind them, and are receiving a utility Desktop as a Service. With no further need for inhouse skills, you can reduce headcounts, potentially by transferring these resources under TUPE to your service partner. Virtual Desktop (VDI) With new virtual technologies, you can deploy desktop applications within your partner s hosting centres. End users can access applications remotely from any location at any time with the device of their choice. Power users who are offline can continue working, refreshing their virtual desktop whenever they next log on. Organisations no longer need to manage and maintain servers and storage internally and can focus on desktop and mobile asset management and support. Within a hosted desktop your service delivery partner hosts users desktop profiles on their own servers within their data centres. The profile contains the applications that the user needs, together with their security and administration limitations. Each user can log on anywhere through an internet connection and work with the same desktop environment that they know. With the desktop in a virtualised, controlled environment, data is protected and backed up as part of the service. This approach addresses not just security and compliance issues, but offers ease of mobility and flexibility to grow the number of desktop users easily and rapidly. High performance and availability are assured to your requirements, while operational costs can again be more easily managed. With a relatively new technology such as virtualisation, where evaluation and migration skills and experience are often a scarce resource, creating a business case can be difficult. An experienced partner will be able to help you determine the viability of this service through cost/benefit modelling. Making the right choices The greater the choice, the more likely you can find the right solution to meet your business requirements. At the same time, the more complex it can be to determine what that solution is. With our knowledge gleaned from working with many enterprises across all market sectors, we have put together a simple programme to help inform you of the service options and provide the information to make the appropriate decisions.
Making the Transition to Desktop as a Service In this paper we ve identified the stages of moving to Desktop as a Service and the benefits that a business can achieve at each level. Here are six steps that you can take to help you explore your business objectives, understand the state of your current desktop service, assess the options for improving service delivery - and then take action. 1. Define business goals in relation to desktop Focus on your business first. What are the major drivers for the business today? What will they be in the future? How do you rate their priorities? Cost reduction will certainly be high on the agenda. Maybe you need to increase operational efficiency or reduce capital expenditure or both? As the economy eventually recovers, supporting business growth will be increasingly important. That requires management and IT resources to focus on strategic development. Creating an excellent customer experience is considered the key to winning business in the future. How will IT support innovation and deliver excellent service? Increasing employee productivity is always good for the bottom line. Businesses can harness the greater mobility of the workforce and the blurring of personal and business tools to increase work rates and employee satisfaction. These are just a few possibilities. When you understand what the business truly needs you can define criteria for the IT success a mix of financial, performance and user satisfaction criteria. 2. Define user role types and usage scenarios With the variety of locations, devices and applications being used by users, it s clear that for cost and performance to be optimised to use, one size no longer fits all. To clarify who needs what, it s important to define different user groups and their usage scenarios. There will be groups that are specific to each business, but generally speaking they are likely to include office-based, remote and mobile workers, as well as those who are driven by applications and those for whom security is a priority. You can build on your business own internal knowledge backed up by tools such as online user surveys to build a clear picture of usage groups. 3. Assess current service delivery model and TCO The next step is to assess your current desktop services with a view to how well they are already performing. With help from potential partners, you can use simple scoring models to assess where there are gaps between business needs and current service performance. At the same time it is important to get a clear picture of the true cost of current desktop management. This TCO comprises not just hardware and software, but must include energy, remote and deskside support resources, insurance and financing. It also covers the cost of lost productivity when the services are unavailable. The aim at this stage is to create a framework that you can use to compare current TCO and performance against possible alternative delivery models.
Making the Transition to Desktop as a Service 4. Define potential service options How do you choose between the service options available? Services can range from asset management through onsite and remote support to fully managed services, and then onto virtual desktop services. The differences to look for are the levels of centralised management and the business advantages that each model offers. It s not a matter of choosing one model only, or making a decision that has to last a lifetime. Whatever your choice now, you can migrate to different models as your business needs change and you see that other models offer potentially greater benefits. With all the information you have now gathered business objectives, user groups, TCO and service delivery options you are well placed to compare how well each option can meet needs. At this point it makes sense to clarify any perceived risks and ensure that you and your potential partner have plans to manage and mitigate against them. 5. Evaluate organisational impact of Desktop as a Service This is the time to evaluate the impact of change. Which functions currently managed by internal teams will be passed across to the partner? It s likely that as inhouse service delivery skills become less important, the need for project and partner management skills will grow, for example. Use a people and skills audit to assess current capabilities, identify skills gaps, and even consider changes in the IT organisational structure. Your HR department can offer valuable advice and you would be well advised to engage them in this process. you can develop a strategic framework and outline plan that you can use as a brief to potential service delivery partners. What do you look for in a partner? The most capable partners will be able to offer services right across the service delivery continuum, from break/fix services to virtualisation. Not only does this demonstrate their breadth of ability, but it ensures that as you migrate to new delivery models, you can choose to retain the same partner or move smoothly to a new partnership. The most experienced and knowledgeable partners will also be showing leadership by championing industry best practice. Your partner should be able to work with you through the transition to new models of service delivery, reliably, securely and with minimum disruption. They should be able to demonstrate their adherence to proven frameworks and industry best practices. Your chosen partner should equally be able to deliver desktop with warranty, protecting your business, data, users and customers. If you re planning to migrate to virtual desktop infrastructures, consider the physical locations of your partner s infrastructure. UK-based data centres built to Tier 3 standards offer assured high levels of resilience and security to ensure key issues such as enterprise risk, governance, security and retention of control are never compromised. When you find a partner who fits these criteria, you will be ready to start exploring how they can help you determine your desktop management strategy. 6. Engage with service provider to assess options in detail You now know what you need to achieve in service delivery and the options available to make that change. With this knowledge
Your next important step Phoenix can help you take control of desktop management. We are trusted to deliver Europe s largest desktop managed service and we know that by moving to a managed or virtual desktop infrastructure model, businesses can find new cost efficiencies as well as simplify the management of an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce. To help customers take advantage of our leading Services portfolio, we ve developed a no-obligation, one-hour Desktop Management assessment. Talk to us about your needs, your challenges and where you are today. We will explain how we can help you deliver a more effective and efficient desktop service. Book a Desktop Assessment Visit: www.phoenix.co.uk/getstarted Call: 0844 863 3000 Email: enquiries@phoenix.co.uk About Phoenix We are UK leaders in managing and supporting IT infrastructures to help businesses innovate and grow, while cutting costs and risk. Through our software support services we can handle the management of your operating systems and applications as well. Our managed services also extend beyond the desktop. We provide a managed IT lifecycle service, handling any installs, moves, additions, changes and disposal. We can monitor and manage your systems and your networks, and provide both hardware and software support. Our consultants will help you assess the benefits of managed IT, carrying out desktop and infrastructure assessments and dealing with compliance and procurement. In cases of need we can provide dedicated onsite or mobile enduser support for rapid fault resolution. From break/fix services to virtual desktop infrastructures, our capabilities give you the support you need to meet user expectations, maintain availability and keep costs down. We have 28 regional sites including data centres and 18 business continuity facilities across the UK and a network of local engineers ready for your call. We employ 2,300 people and more than 1,300 are technology specialists. We re an established provider with a wide portfolio and extensive experience, already trusted to deliver Europe s largest desktop managed service. Take advantage of a complete lifecycle solution, or select individual modules. We ll deliver, commission and manage your client platforms, and offer you flexible financing options.
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