At their best, hosted desktops are secure, mobile, cost-efficient, flexible, and easy to use and manage. A hosted desktop, to be considered ideal, should be compatible with any application and be characteristically powerful, secure, backed up, and scalable. Here’s a point-by-point explanation of why a hosted desktop requires all of these key features to be effective:
- A performance level equal to that of a locally-installed operating system. An operating system or hosted desktop that’s slow, laggy, unresponsive, and/or prone to downtime isn’t of much use to anyone; it can turn tasks as simple as surfing the Web or checking email into a frustrating, time-consuming ordeal, and consequently be a drag on a business’s productivity.
- The ability to host any Windows-compatible application. A hosted desktop’s most important feature is its ability to install and launch applications. Hosted desktops also distinguish themselves from hosted applications in being able to launch multiple applications at once in a consolidated environment. This is a more favorable arrangement to users because they can avoid dealing with multiple SaaS accounts and connections; their data is centrally and accessibly stored; and it provides them with access to the Web and their email inboxes as well. And, because installing and launching applications is the hosted desktop’s most important feature, it’s obviously preferable for a hosted desktop to be able to host as many applications as possible.
- Comprehensive IT security. Hosted desktops are more centralized than physical desktops or individual hosted applications and contain all of a user’s programs, files, and settings. It’s convenient to have all of these critical IT assets and resources in one place; however, it’s also more dangerous, because anyone that gained unauthorized entry to the hosted desktop would be able to access all of these same programs and databases.
- Complete data backups. Another way to ensure the preservation and privacy of all of the consolidated documents and data on a hosted desktop is with frequent, managed backups.
- Scalability. With an on-site IT infrastructure, businesses must buy new PCs, servers, or storage devices whenever they need to add more users, CPU, RAM, or storage capacity. With hosted desktops, adding IT resources becomes the responsibility of the hosting provider.
Hosted desktops are only a valuable investment if they have all five of these features, which happens to be the case with IronOrbit Virtual Desktop Hosting:
- IronOrbit hosted desktops perform at least as well as a locally-installed operating system on a fully-equipped PC; in fact, thanks to our exclusive Atomic Speed Technology, IronOrbit hosted desktops are the world’s fastest, allowing users to launch applications in as little as one second.
- You can install any Windows-compatible application on an IronOrbit hosted desktop. The combinations of applications that can be installed on an IronOrbit hosted desktop are basically unlimited. Most of our clients request applications such as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Visio, Project, and Publisher), QuickBooks, Sage 50, Abacus, Amicus, and EMR/EHRs.
- Security isn’t a concern with IronOrbit hosted desktops because we protect our hosted desktops with enterprise-level Orbital Security (firewall, antivirus, spam blocker, IPS/IDS, patch management, file encryption, and content filter). Our other security measures include two-factor authentication (delivered in partnership with Duo Security) and the fact that the data on our hosted desktops never leaves our ultra-secure servers.
- At IronOrbit, we back up all of our hosted desktops to a secure off-site location on a daily basis.
- IronOrbit can add users, CPU, RAM, and HDD to its hosted desktops at any time without disrupting the performance or availability of an existing deployment.
Contact an IronOrbit sales representative to sign up today for IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions, Virtual Desktop Hosting, or Cloud Hosting!