Recently my old friend, Steve Thomas, made a quip that when the world ends only the cockroaches and Win32 applications will remain. There is a lot of talk about IT and application modernization. Much of it is framed around Software as a Service (SaaS), which clearly has a bright future. However, the reality for most enterprises is many of their existing Win32 applications will not be going away any time soon. Any attempt to modernize most enterprises will require a solution that is inclusive of those Win32 applications.
This is where modern application provisioning comes in. Modern provisioning as a category tends to feature cloud-hosted solutions for deploying and managing applications. Due to rapidly changing work styles, it has become imperative for enterprises to have cloud-native infrastructure for deploying and managing applications to any desktop, on any network. Its critical these solutions can provision to desktops running in Microsoft Azure today, a desktop in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) tomorrow, and a laptop on a user’s home network with or without a VPN next week.
Sometimes Cloud Solutions Sacrifice Performance for Scale
Not all modern provisioning solutions are created equal. You may have experienced certain certain cloud-native products that take over an hour (in some cases, up to 24 hours) to complete application deployments to end user desktops. While these solutions provide the scale of the cloud and do offer a way to deploy and manage applications on any desktop anywhere and offer a way to reduce dependency on VPN, some struggle from a performance perspective. This is unacceptable in our era of instant gratification where employees expect the applications they need exactly when they need them and not a second later. The younger workers of today entering the workforce find it mind boggling they can quickly install any application they want on their personal mobile device with ease, but a large, highly skilled enterprise IT team takes hours or days to do the same for them on their work devices.
There is a need for modern provisioning due to the changed nature of work styles. Understandably, there is an unwillingness to move to cloud-native infrastructure if it means providing a worse experience than current on-premises solutions. This leads organizations to pivot away from the cloud when it comes to managing their applications and stick with their familiar existing tools.
They may end up keeping a software deployment tool in-use that lives in their own datacenter and pushes applications to remote endpoints when (and only when) they happen to connect to a corporate VPN, yielding network saturation that creates performance problems for all users of the VPN. They may keep a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution they are not fully satisfied with due to insufficient resources, all because the modern provisioning solution they tried was not fast enough for them to rely on when pushing urgent application updates for applications with known vulnerabilities or handle their most business-critical applications.
I am here to say modern provisioning solutions are the path forward. You just need to find a solution which can achieve modern provisioning with speed.
Modern Provisioning with Enterprise-Scale and Speed
Allow me to introduce you to Numecent’s Cloudpager: the first and only cloud-native application container management platform for Windows desktops. Built on decades of research, 62 patents authored by our own team of Windows experts, and a robust cloud infrastructure that has been supporting our customers for a decade, the platform is battle-tested, providing global scale, high performance, and true resiliency. The service deploys applications over HTTPS and requires minimal firewall configuration, making it easy to onboard and – perhaps best of all – makes application deployments quick!
You can deploy net-new application packages or patches within seconds. Thanks to our leading virtualization technologies, applications can be dynamically provisioned to active user desktop sessions in real-time without the need for users to logout or reboot to get their applications.
Support for Modern Application Packages
Cloudpager supports multiple container formats including Amazon Workspaces Application Manager (WAM) , App-V, MSIX, and Numecent’s own Cloudpaging application containers. Cloudpaging application containers are best-in-class, boasting a 95%+ compatibility rate. Achieving this high rate of compatibility and deployment success is possible because applications that may pose a problem for traditional virtualization, container, and layering products (e.g., those with drivers, COM+ component services, certain types of Windows Services, user-based installs, etc.) are not a problem for our containers thanks to Cloudpaging’s unique sandbox environment and granular controls down to the file-level. Large complex applications are no problem. We have customers packaging and deploying applications that are over 40GB in size.
By delivering all your applications as containers, you eliminate most of the common Windows application challenges faced in enterprises. Application conflicts disappear, failed or incomplete uninstalls become a problem of the past, and operating system rot (OS rot) is non-existent. Applications do not install in a traditional sense when using containers, so all Windows Installer errors are eliminated. You no longer require the active setup feature for deploying user specific components, so containers can also help with some login slowness issues and more!
Cloud-Native Infrastructure is the Key to Modern Provisioning
Due to the increasingly diverse nature of work styles enterprises must support, cloud-native infrastructure is critical for enterprise-scale application management and providing a great digital employee experience. We are proud that Cloudpager runs on a global cloud backbone that has been in production for more than 10 years which has achieved high availability and has provided a stellar experience providing applications to desktops all over the world in seconds. Cloudpager can be the modern provisioning solution to uplift your applications to the cloud and for your organization to realize the power of real-time application management on any Windows desktop, anywhere!
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