With IronOrbit hosted desktops, businesses that don’t manufacture anything and don’t perform any services that require face-to-face interaction with a customer don’t even need an office—all of their employees can work from off-site locations. Though many businesses, even those with the realistic ability to switch to an all-virtual office, would oppose the idea because it’s easier for employees to collaborate with and motivate their colleagues when they work alongside each other, the fact that IronOrbit hosted desktops make it possible to switch to an all-virtual office is a testament to the solution’s extensive mobile and collaborative capabilities.
IronOrbit hosted desktops are hosted IT solutions that appear and perform just like Windows desktop operating systems. As with a version of Windows installed on a PC desktop or laptop, users are able to save files, access emails, browse the Web, and utilize applications with a hosted virtual desktop. IronOrbit hosted desktop users all receive their own assigned, semi-permanent hosted desktop that retains all of their applications, files, and settings even after they log out.
Hosted desktops are a key component of the virtual office not only because they replace on-site PC workstations as the employee’s primary workspace, but also because they can be deployed in combination with collaborative applications and solutions such as Microsoft Lync (instant messaging and teleconferencing), Microsoft SharePoint (file sharing and project management), and onthenetPhone (IronOrbit’s reliable and cost-effective VoIP solution). Features of IronOrbit hosted desktops that make them an indispensable part of a virtual office also include:
- They don’t require any on-site servers. Businesses obviously don’t have a data center or a store room in their virtual office in which to house the servers for their hosted desktops. IronOrbit hosted desktops fortunately don’t require on-site servers, however, since all their processing and storage takes place on the hardware in our data centers.
- They’re centralized and accessible from anywhere. To ensure that employees can communicate and collaborate with each other, a virtual office needs a centralized, anywhere-accessible IT infrastructure. IronOrbit hosted virtual desktops are centralized (the applications and databases of all the hosted desktops in a deployment are shared) and users can access them from anywhere (their home, a coffee shop, etc.) with any Internet-connected desktop, laptop, thin client, tablet, or smartphone.
- They’re managed and maintained 24x7x365. Just like an on-site IT infrastructure, the IT infrastructure of a virtual office has to be supported, secured, maintained, and backed up. With IronOrbit hosted desktops, businesses with virtual offices get all of the IT support they’ll ever need—24x7x365 technical support, Orbital Security, around-the-clock performance monitoring and infrastructure maintenance, and managed data backups.
- They perform as well as on-site workstations. Businesses don’t have to sacrifice performance or reliability for the availability and centralization of IronOrbit hosted desktops. The CPU, RAM, and storage capacity of IronOrbit hosted virtual desktops are greater than that of the average PC workstation. Finally, the applications that we install on our hosted desktops are the full desktop versions that a user would install on a PC or server, not the stripped-down “cloud” versions offered by some hosting providers and software developers.
Switching to an all-virtual office allows businesses to do away with their real estate and energy costs. IBM, for example, saves about $100 million per year in real estate costs by letting 42% of its workers telecommute. Employees, meanwhile, can spend less time commuting and more time working or resting. Whether a business wants to switch to a virtual office or simply wants to upgrade to a more cost-effective, flexible, and mobile IT infrastructure, however, its course of action should be the same: to contact IronOrbit and sign up for hosted desktops or application hosting today!