What about the users' experience?
Welcome to the latest article in my blog describing our journey as an early adopter of "the cloud", starting back in 2002.
Anyone that’s looked at my profile or read any of my previous posts knows that I am a very strong advocate of DaaS.
There is, however, one part that most hosting companies seem to repeatedly forget. It hasn’t been mentioned by any potential supplier unless I started the conversation. I’m yet to be able to have it added to a list of SLA’s in any meaningful way.
What is “it”?
It’s the users’ experience.
I must admit to giving up on tracking how many calls or emails we get from end-users saying:
- “the system is running slow”
- “my keyboard isn’t keeping up with my typing”
- “the mouse is jumping around the screen”
Or any other similar complaint that revolves around them not being able to work seamlessly and easily.
Unless it lasts more than 10 minutes, there really isn’t much point asking the question of support, as the response will be, 9 times out of 10:
“The logs don’t show any issues, and everything is running correctly here.”
Of course, this is true. The logs only take a reading every 10 or 15 minutes, and even if they were set at a more granular level, they probably wouldn’t be much help, as they’re logging the wrong things.
Slowly but surely, there are services and products out there that can help to evaluate what the end-user is experiencing, and we’ve certainly had some success with one.
The biggest frustration though is getting the hosting company to agree that the logs don’t give a real view of how the outside world consumes their services and what frustrations the user community are facing, sometimes daily.
To me, it’s currently one of the biggest barriers and why more companies aren’t moving to DaaS. The 1st company that goes to market with a product that is built around the end-user experience would have a real advantage. As the Gartner report in 2017 said:
“Delivering a user experience that's as good as, or better, than an employee's current PC experience is the most important critical success factor when adopting VDI or DaaS.”
I couldn’t agree more!
Please let me know in the comments if there are any specific areas or questions you would like me to cover in future posts.
Previous posts in this series can be found on my website - www.liamgquinn.com
I do enjoy your posts Liam👍