DaaS for Accounting Industry — What are the benefits
The landscape that consistently experiences evolution is the accounting industry. One day you are going through the old accounting books and catching up with audit requirements, and the next day rules change, and you need to adjust to the new market demands.
In the midst of these dynamic market requirements, you need to take care of your hardware and ensure operational efficiency. While you can move your applications to the cloud, what about the desktops? Can you move the whole setup to the cloud?
Of course, you can!
Utilize Desktop as a Service to access your old desktop units more effectively and reduce your IT maintenance costs.
Desktop as a Service is nothing but your desktop on the cloud. An instance of the cloud server hosts your desktop OS, data, and applications. This helps you access the latest upgrades of the OS on your Windows 7 as well. It means that you can use your old system hosts with DaaS. Since OS is on your cloud server, you can reduce the costs of hardware.
Benefits of Desktop as a Service in the Accounting Industry
As an accounting firm, you may have several business-critical applications and data that are important for the organization. Maintaining these applications on outdated desktops is a difficult task. To reduce the complexity of your IT systems, optimize your budget, and increase accessibility, utilize DaaS. Check how Desktop as a Service can help your accounting business:
1. Remote Access
Remote access to your employees only means that they can access their desktops and all its applications from anywhere. Being an accounting professional, it is obvious that your accountants need to work on the go. But, how is that possible without remote access?
DaaS can help you set up your desktop virtually from any place. Whether you are on vacation or at home, you can easily open your desktop and access its data. The only necessary requirement for this is an internet connection.
So, this means that your desktop is now portable. You can carry it anywhere without risking theft. In physical laptop or computer, theft is a major concern. If someone steals your laptop, you end up risking the company’s data. In DaaS, you can secure your business information from theft and related risks without setting up a local data storage on your computer.
2. Cross-Platform Access and BYOD
Let’s understand this with an example:
When you are working on a desktop, which is placed in your office, you need access to this system to consume data locally stored on this computer. If, one day, this system crashes, then what will you do?
In this case, the only thing that you can do is call the IT team and wait for them to recover data, which is not even possible in some cases. What will be your contingency plans?
In reality, this type of event only leads to lost data, manhours, and a lot of hassle.
What can help you overcome this situation?
It is the Desktop as a Service.
With DaaS, even when one of your systems fails and stops working, you can use another system to sign in to your virtual desktop and access its data and apps. You can open your desktop on your phone, laptop, or tablet. Apart from this, there’s no restriction on the OS on which you are accessing DaaS. Whether you are a Mac user or an Android user, you can use your virtual desktop stored on the cloud server.
3. Data Protection
Considering the increase in cyberattacks, data security and protection is a pressing issue for every organization. Every accounting firm contains data and information, which is critical to the organization. If you lose this data in any way, you will risk the security of your clients and your reputation.
When you work remotely, the risk further increases.
The only thing that you can do to mitigate these risks is by using Desktop as a Service. The DaaS provider protects your data under various circumstances. Here are a few ways:
· Their facilities are spread across geographies and multiple data centers containing the exact same copy of your data to ensure redundancy and disaster recovery.
· The data centers don’t allow unauthorized access, which reduces the risk of theft and stealing inside the center.
· Since there’s multi-level access, you have the power to define access control to your data, which reduces unauthorized access at your end.
· There’s multi-factor authentication, which again eliminates the chances of unauthorized access.
· There are various security controls, such as data encryption, intrusion detection system, multiple firewalls, authorization system, etc. to protect your data.
4. Scalability
Even when you are remotely working, your devices have limited storage. But, the need for storing accounting data never decreases. It always increases. With remote functioning, how can your IT team improve your system’s storage capacity?
Fortunately, this is not needed in DaaS. Since everything is online, you can always virtually access more storage. Just contact your provider and scale your requirements as per business needs. When you have fewer data storage needs, you can descale whenever there’s a requirement.
5. Support and Maintenance
Support and maintenance are regularly required by any accounting firm. For instance, when you need to upgrade the system, take a backup, or maintain the system to ensure longevity.
It takes up a lot of your IT resources, and it is not even possible to cater to the demands of every user.
With DaaS services, you can reach the provider anytime. There’s usually round-the-clock support, which allows easy query solving and hassle-free guidance.
For maintenance, you don’t even need to reach out to the support team. This is because the DaaS provider’s team automatically backs up your data and maintains your desktops without you reminding them.
Conclusion
Desktop as a Service is not just a medium to reduce your costs, but it is also a way to improve your efficiency and enhance the performance of your team. In the COVID-19 pandemic, we have truly realized the power of technology and remote working.
With DaaS implementation in your office, you can empower your employees to work more flexibly; in a way they want. Check the above benefits of DaaS for the accounting industry and begin your implementation process.