This paper explores five specific use cases where Concero Cloud Desktops deliver the mobility, security, ease of use, and cost reductions today’s businesses need.
Industry analysts and thought leaders love to talk about workspaces-as-a-service (WaaS) on a high level as a driver of business transformation. The rest of us tend to be more grounded in real-world questions and challenges. How can I support BYOD without sacrificing security? How can I reduce the cost and complexity of supporting desktop IT.
Concero Cloud Desktops delivers real-world, out-of-the-box solutions to small and medium sized businesses with the full power of industry-leading Citrix virtual desktop and application technology. This is the same technology used by the 10 largest companies in healthcare, banking, automotive and aerospace.1
Concero Cloud Desktops flex with business needs, whether the priority is to empower users with BYOD, improve security and compliance, simplify OS migrations or conserve IT budget by transitioning away from desktop PCs.
1 Source: TechValidate.
Lowering IT Costs
The use cases discussed here illustrate one of the most compelling aspects of Concero Cloud Desktops: cost reduction. With Concero Cloud Desktops your organization can:
- Consume business desktops, apps, data, and documents on any device, from anywhere at a fraction of the time and budget previously required.
- Scale IT and its costs on-demand through a monthly, per user subscription model.
- Escape traditional PC refresh cycles with the ability to deliver Concero Cloud Desktops via thin clients and other low-cost devices over any network with a native-like user experience.
- Support BYOD and shift the cost of endpoint purchasing and management to employees themselves.
Concero Cloud Desktops provides simple, effective way to address a broad range of high-priority IT needs to enable the modern workforce. This service dramatically simplifies IT while delivering secure, any-device mobility through industry-best desktop and application virtualization technology. At the same time, overall IT costs are reduced and scale on-demand to fit perfectly with your business needs.
Employees access their apps and desktopsthrough a simple “StoreFront” with a consistent experience across all their devices.
Security and Compliance
Today’s IT leaders face the challenge of reducing business risk while enabling people to work however best suits their purposes—any location, any time, any device. Data stored locally on laptops, tablets and smartphones is at constant risk of compromise through loss, theft or malware, and public networks present additional risks. To comply with both government regulations and security best practices, IT needs a way to protect corporate data without restricting user productivity.
Concero Cloud Desktops centralize data and documents in the data center, where comprehensive activity logging, reporting and audit make it much simpler to address mandates for privacy, compliance and risk management. IT can allow access to desktops, apps, data, and documents based on use case-driven, task-specific access control—including policies to determine what actions users may perform with each app. Concero Cloud Desktops are hosted in SSAE 16 SOC II certified data centers and are FIPS-compliant and Common Criteria-certified to meet the highest standards of regulated industries. Pre-configured security templates enable IT to lock down the environment in just a few clicks, providing a fast and simple way to increase security. If someone’s laptop is stolen or gets a virus, it doesn’t matter because everything they’re accessing is centrally located in our data center, not running around on individual devices.
For staff, Concero Cloud Desktops provides a simple, consistent experience to access desktops, apps, data and documents on any device without the need to deal with complex user-facing security measures. This encourages adoption and discourages rouge IT which can compromise security.
Secure Mobility and BYOD
Today’s employees need to work from anywhere—a customer location, a home office, an airport lounge—with full access to all of their apps and data with a great user experience. As personal devices flow into every organization, you also need a way to deal with the ad hoc bring-your-own device (BYOD) program that likely already exists in your environment, whether sanctioned or grass-roots. In either case, Concero Cloud Desktops makes it possible to deliver a user’s complete mobile cloud desktop on any device they choose to use—including their own personal devices—over any network while you maintain full security and control. Mobility is one of the many benefits of Cloud Desktops.
Concero Cloud Desktops enable secure productivity on any device, anywhere, by providing users with seamless, secure access to their desktops, apps and documents without having to join your corporate network. This unified solution enables the secure delivery of Windows and web apps to all type of devices, including Windows and Linux desktops, Macs, thin clients, tablets and smartphones.
IT gains a single point to manage access control and can limit actions based on both user identity and the endpoint device, providing better application security, data protection and compliance management. A seamless login process leads the user to an enterprise StoreFront to select the apps or desktops they want to use. Concero Cloud Desktops also optimizes the network traffic for the remote connection by caching video traffic to reduce re-transmitting, and by prioritizing interactive traffic like voice and video over bulk file transfers and print jobs to ensure a high-performance experience.
Able to work from anywhere with the same, consistent portable, always-available cloud desktop, employees can achieve higher productivity and job satisfaction while driving business agility and competitive advantage for the organization.
Secure Web Apps
As web browser-based apps continue to grow in popularity in the enterprise, IT needs to ensure that they remain as secure and manageable as any other type of application. In many cases, web apps have been developed for specific browsers or plug-ins that may now be outdated or pose security threats. Frequent browser updates compound the challenge, especially when multiple browsers are in use in the organization, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Edge.
By using Concero Cloud Desktop to access web apps, sensitive information is retained in the data center, not in the user’s local browser cache, eliminating the risk of loss or theft. Nothing is left behind on the end user’s device when the network connection is terminated.
Concero Cloud Desktops also reduce web app management costs. Administrators can pre-package the best web browser and the plug-ins needed for each web app. As a result, updates on the user’s device have no impact on the compatibility of the web apps they use. A consistent user experience across any device and browser can considerably reduce costly help desk calls as well.
OS Migrations
Its the first month of a new Microsoft OS release and already there is urgency for IT to support migrations. For PC-based IT infrastructures this an arduous process. Compatibility testing with hardware and applications is time consuming and BYOD poses an additional layer of complexity.
Concero Cloud Desktops solves this two ways. First, regardless of the OS running on the end-user’s device they can securely access their Concero Cloud Desktop (desktops, applications, data, and documents) at the data center. Thus, OS upgrades on end-user devices cease to be a major concern to IT.
Second, the OS used by the Cloud Desktop itself can be easily upgraded. Concero Cloud Desktop has technology that lets applications be installed independently from the underlying OS. As a result, applications can be moved seamlessly from one OS to another. This dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of OS migrations and makes your business more secure, agile and productive.