Desktop as a Service Solution

The Vendor is required to provide desktop as a service (DaaS) solution.
- The university operates within a highly decentralized, hub-and-spoke IT governance model, requiring solutions that balance centralized security oversight with strong departmental autonomy.
- Key Objectives
• Federated Governance: Central IT defines mandatory security and compliance baselines while departments retain operational control.
• Research & Data Protection: Support for FERPA, HIPAA, FedRAMP (Moderate/High), ITAR, and controlled research data.
• Zero Trust Alignment: Identity- and device-aware access without traditional VPN reliance.
• Cloud Elasticity: On-demand scaling for instruction, research, and administrative workloads.
- Administrative Hierarchy and Federated Management
• The DaaS platform must support a multi-tenant or hierarchical administrative model that allows central governance while enabling departmental autonomy.
• Central Oversight: Ability to enforce non-overridable global security policies such as MFA, encryption, and session logging.
• Delegated Administration: Scoped departmental admin access for images, applications, resource pools, and user assignments.
• Policy Inheritance: Clear conflict-resolution model between central and departmental policies.
- Desktop and Application Delivery
• Support for persistent and non-persistent desktops.
• Support for pooled and dedicated desktop models.
• Published applications and application streaming.
• Windows and Linux desktop operating systems.
• GPU-enabled desktops for visualization and research workloads.
• User profile management and image lifecycle controls.
- Security and Policy Controls
• Clipboard, printing, drive, USB, and peripheral redirection controls.
• Screen capture controls and/or session recording.
• Encryption of data in transit and at rest.
• Integration with institutional DLP or sensitivity labeling solutions.
• Malware and ransomware protection within desktop sessions.
• Centralized audit logging with SIEM export capability.
- Identity, Access, and Device Context
• Federated identity support for SAML 2.0, OIDC, and Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD).
• Just-in-Time provisioning and de-provisioning.
• Conditional access based on user roles, device posture, network, and location.
• Support for managed and unmanaged (BYOD) endpoints via native or browser-based clients.
- Availability, Performance, and Scalability
• High-availability service architecture and resiliency.
• Disaster recovery and regional failover options.
• Bandwidth optimization and latency tolerance.
• Desktop and application performance monitoring.