Physical Endpoints Are Here to Stay
Several years ago, sales of laptops significantly declined. Analysts predicted a continuous shift away from traditional fat client laptops, desktops, and workstations to tablets, smartphones, and notebooks. As we now know, the impending death of traditional physical endpoints was greatly exaggerated. Demand for laptops soared the past few years as workers moved en-masse to work from home. Today, as organizations solidify permanent strategies for remote and hybrid working styles, they are assessing what desktop types suit each role and persona in their userbase.
Some personas, such as those task workers who perhaps only use two or three Windows applications and a handful of web applications, may not require a full desktop. Perhaps they can work with applications published in a self-service storefront on their own personal devices or on a corporate thin client. Others require significantly more Windows applications and their work style suits a virtual desktop running in the cloud. There may be some power users utilizing compute-heavy applications that need a laptop or physical desktop. Mapping personas and gathering user sentiment can help drive what type of desktop each employee is assigned and improve their overall Digital Employee Experience (DEX).
While the type of device and desktop your employees get is important, it’s just as critical to address the applications your end users need to do their job. A desktop without the applications employees need is pointless. When offering employees different types of desktops, efficiently scaling requires a uniform method for managing and provisioning applications, regardless of end user desktop types. So, how do you standardize application provisioning across a broad spectrum of desktops, while ensuring applications consistently perform at a high level regardless of where desktops are hosted or where employees reside?
Modern Provisioning and Application Management in Hybrid IT Environments
Managing applications on any desktop, anywhere, requires a cloud-native solution. The beauty of provisioning applications from the cloud is you can orchestrate deployments and updates to any device anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Not all platforms are created equal though. You will need to consider which application package formats are supported. For example, a cloud solution that only supports traditional formats (e.g., Windows installers, setup.exes) is not optimal, as these types of packages can be susceptible to installation failures, application conflicts, application corruption preventing a successful uninstall, and more. When modernizing your application provisioning capabilities, you should leave legacy problems in the past as you move your management mechanisms to the cloud.
Another factor to consider when choosing a cloud native application management product is speed. There is no point in adopting a new platform if performance and the end user experience is poor. Too many products struggle to provide both the scale enterprise customers expect while provisioning applications in a timely manner.
Cloudpager Provides Unprecedented Speed and Scale
Enter Cloudpager: Numecent’s cloud-native container management platform for Windows desktops. Built upon our technology portfolio of more than 60 patents (and counting) spanning the last decade, the platform enables you to seamlessly provision and manage applications across any Windows desktop with incredible speed and scale. The platform provides a sleek, intuitive, and highly automated cloud management console to ensure a great experience for administrators and users alike.
Delivered as a fully managed, cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Cloudpager is Windows OS agnostic, providing a single pane of glass for managing applications in on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Its modern provisioning capabilities brings the benefits of application virtualization and cloud-based container management to your physical endpoints anywhere – whether on your corporate network or fully remote – as well as virtual desktops hosted in your data center or the cloud. As your organization moves to hybrid with employees switching between networks and between physical and virtual desktops, Cloudpager ensures applications are rapidly delivered to the employees’ Windows desktops. The experience for employees will be the same across any desktop they log into. While they won’t know how it’s being done (applications being dynamically provisioned to their desktops from the cloud, running as if natively installed), they will appreciate it.
Modern Provisioning and Application Management for all Windows Desktops
Application containers do not suffer from the same limitations and issues experienced with traditional installer types. The beauty of Cloudpager is it is a true, cloud-native container management platform. What do I mean by that? For starters, it does not just support Numecent’s Cloudpaging format. It also provides native support for App-V, MSIX, and WorkSpaces Application Manager (WAM) packages. This is perfect for bringing continuity to your existing App-V packages and for managing MSIX containers as your organization adopts that technology. While App-V and MSIX can be restrictive due to application compatibility limitations, Cloudpager can optimize almost any application package for the latest Windows desktop environments, empowering you to successfully deploy your entire application estate across your enterprise.
Cloudpager also helps modernize how you manage applications with Workpods, which enable you to auto-deploy groups of applications to security groups and users. This makes it drastically easier to orchestrate application deployments to your employees. Its Storefronts feature provides a mechanism to provide self-service application access to those who do not require a dedicated full desktop.
Conclusion
To truly modernize and optimize application delivery in hybrid environments, regardless of the type of desktops you are managing, you need a cloud-native solution. Cloudpager provides the most intuitive and robust solution to manage applications at enterprise scale. It maximizes application deployment success with dynamic application deployments, updates, rollbacks, and recalls across any Window desktops, with the flexibility to provide self-service access via Storefronts. You gain a single solution to provision ALL your applications to ANY modern physical or virtual Windows desktop in a highly automated fashion.