Nutanix’s Chris Howard: Desktop as a Service Could Help Agencies Implement Flexible Work Strategy

Chris Howard, vice president of U.S. public sector at Nutanix, wrote in a GCN article published Tuesday that federal agencies seeking to provide employees access to data and applications in a more flexible way during the COVID-19 pandemic should consider adopting desktop-as-a-service platforms.

“DaaS removes the burden of managing an on-prem control plane by delivering the same functionality as a service from the cloud,” Howard wrote. “The actual desktop workloads can be orchestrated by the service to run in multiple public clouds, government clouds and even on-prem private clouds based on agency requirements.”

He said there are four benefits of DaaS agencies should consider as they reassess their virtual desktop infrastructure and one of those is secure internet browsing.

“Through DaaS, even if a desktop operating system is modified or corrupted during one user session, the next time the user logs in, all changes will have disappeared,” Howard said. “This also ensures that any kind of attacks against the browser stay within the VDI session and never make it back into the core enterprise.”

Howard also discussed the other three benefits of DaaS to agencies: uniquely tailored contractor desktops; application augmentation; and multicloud and data gravity.