How State Agencies Can Bring DaaS to Life
By empowering agencies with DaaS, Maxon is looking in part to help those agencies deliver better support to end users.
“There is a challenge in terms of device management for a large enterprise. When issues occur, it’s hard to get help when everybody’s doing things differently,” he says.
DaaS addresses this while also bolstering security. With centralized device management, “we are moving toward more real-time patching, looking to see what current vulnerabilities exist in the environment and then using the tools to rapidly remediate those vulnerabilities,” Maxon says.
Other states are also moving in this direction, delivering DaaS as a product of the IT department and in support of their efforts to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In Indiana, for example, the Office of Technology provides DaaS for approximately 100 state agencies of the executive branch.
READ MORE: State agencies can prepare well for application modernization.
“We are supporting about 40,000 desktops, and we have a virtual offering that we use too, with about 5,000 virtual machines running on Amazon Web Services in a state-owned tenant that we manage,” says Indiana Chief Operating Officer Jeff Allen.
Prior to DaaS, “all IT services were decentralized throughout the state, so you had a hundred different agencies all trying to do different things. You had big discrepancies in technology and security,” Allen says.
“The idea was to pull everybody into one system from an infrastructure point of view, to leverage the state’s buying power and to promote standardization with a better level of support,” he says. Now, in support of Dell devices, “we work with our agencies to understand the number of machines, the hardware requirements.”
When new devices are needed, “we handle all that ordering, and when the machines come to us, we image them and we install the agency-specific applications.” Periodically, the team refreshes those devices, he says.
