In the summer of 2014, I attended a Citrix roadmap seminar for Citrix service providers at the company’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Citrix HQ was full of energy and exuded the confidence you’d expect to see from a cloud technology innovator. And while their product experts shared their Citrix vision over the next couple of days, I had a knot in my stomach. That knot was SaaS. Why would I need to invest more in virtual desktop solutions when many software vendors were migrating their file server-based software to their own hosted software-as-a-service offerings? As a Citrix service provider, I was growing concerned about our virtual desktop client portfolio.

I was already seeing the growing SaaS trend affect our customer base. As technology advisers, we were being asked to evaluate SaaS solutions by our clients. Their LOB software vendors were crowing over the virtues of their new SaaS offerings. The SaaS pitch was that businesses could keep the remote access and cloud capability to their software without having to invest in VDI. And while the SaaS trend has not abated, a funny thing happened as the virtual desktop was being dragged to the technology heap. Yahoo lost over 1 billion user accounts from a “state-sponsored breach.” eBay had 145 million user accounts exposed in a hack. Ransomware started locking down hospital networks and freezing small businesses out of their computers. A series of never-ending viruses, ransomware and data breaches were announced month after month, culminating in the summer of 2017 with the Equifax breach that exposed the consumer financial data of roughly 1/3 of the U.S. population.

The rapid increase in cybersecurity incidents do not make SaaS solutions any less secure than they were in 2014, but they do highlight the increased need for greater security management. This need for additional security runs contrary to SaaS deployment, which touts a freedom from centralized management and consolidation. With SaaS, especially in SMBs, personal and unmanaged devices can more easily proliferate in organizations without the oversight of centralized deployment.

So we now have a world with fractured business data, SaaS applications, roaming computing devices and a global cybersecurity threat. But due to these circumstances, it looks as if the virtual desktop is making its presence felt once again as a tool that can protect businesses without complicating deployments or restricting productivity. In fact, virtual desktops are a great deployment platform for SaaS. According to market research performed by Technavio, the desktop-as-a-service market (a form of VDI) is expected to grow by 44% by 2020. According to its research, greater usage of DaaS and virtual desktops within the financial sector have been taking place to reduce the cost of compliance enforcement and to increase security. And since security breaches show no signs of slowing down in 2018, VDI may continue to be a great option for companies looking to take every precaution possible.

Running SaaS in a virtual desktop may seem to defeat the purpose of a browser-based software deployment, but in many ways, it enhances it. The adoption of SaaS in a company may have started with one application, but it has likely resulted in multiple SaaS solutions. Keeping all those application links straight and easily accessible without publicly advertising the resources can be challenging. But with a virtual desktop, it is a simple task to publish a web browser loaded with the links, plug-ins and security settings needed. When upgrades to SaaS software require browser changes, this can be accomplished centrally with no changes made on user devices.

However, there are downsides to VDI. While the end product of SaaS deployed within virtual desktops can ease end-user deployment, the VDI infrastructure setup is highly technical. Companies must have the resources to deploy and support the environment themselves or engage a vendor to manage their solution. This adds to deployment costs, which must be offset against the gain in additional controls over your SaaS environment.

Still, compliance with government regulations and the need for business data security increasingly show that anti-virus software, firewalls and web filtering are not enough. More advanced security measures are needed such as intrusion detection systems (IDS), log monitoring and real-time threat detection. These additional security requirements are not only costly but add additional technology burdens to businesses. A better option for some who wish to implement these security measures is to restrict data and application access to a secured, centralized deployment environment like VDI. In this secured environment, SaaS solutions can be leveraged to simplify software deployments and reduce the hosted infrastructure needed to deliver the business applications.