Launching Ancero Cloud Workspace as we celebrate our 20th anniversary in business was no coincidence. We believe so strongly in the cloud and this particular platform as game changers for small and medium businesses that we wanted Cloud Workspace directly associated with this important milestone in our company’s history.
Why do we feel so strongly about Cloud Workspace, and why has it been so well-received in the SMB community? The simplest way to convey its business value is to explain the three Cs – convenience, control, and customization.
Cloud Convenience
Ancero Cloud Workspace delivers on the promise of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) without the complexity and inconsistency of the past. Your employees can use any desktop or mobile device to access a controlled, hosted desktop environment, including the operating system.
Ancero takes care of storage, backups, application support and updates, endpoint management, resource provisioning, load balancing, and troubleshooting of network issues. This not only takes the burden of infrastructure management and maintenance off your hands, but also ensures the highest levels of performance for your business applications.
When you want to add new services, just add them to your cloud desktop rather than upgrading equipment. Cloud Workspace allows you to scale quickly and effortlessly by minimizing the complexity of desktop deployments. This simplicity also makes it easier to enforce security with consistent policies and meet compliance requirements on all desktop environments and devices.
Although Microsoft has taken steps to simplify licensing, choosing and managing licenses is still complicated and time-consuming. Many organizations end up purchasing more licenses than they need to avoid noncompliance, or they buy the wrong licensing. As a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), Ancero can handle the license selection, billing, and ongoing management for your company.
Cloud Control
As a managed services provider, one of the most common support calls we receive is to undo changes made to endpoint devices – by users who shouldn’t be making changes! Ancero Cloud Workspace has built-in controls that prevent users from making unwanted, unnecessary, or accidental changes to your network environment. You choose which applications and websites are permissible, which helps you minimize human error and web-based threats.
Adding web filtering solutions secures the network against the potential for downloading dangerous or malicious applications, visiting questionable websites, and user activity that hogs bandwidth, like streaming videos that aren’t related to work functions. By layering in an email security solution you will protect against malicious links and harmful attachments that a user may click on in a phishing email.
With Cloud Workspace, you can assign security settings, configure access controls, and lock down devices at the user level. Because granting full access privileges to all employees for the sake of convenience dramatically increases the likelihood of a data breach or compliance violation.
A number of our clients have taken advantage of these capabilities to reduce the risk of data exposure without compromising productivity. For example:
- A boutique retained executive search firm eliminated their physical office space and selected Cloud Workspace to provide full functionality and productivity for their entire team who now works remotely from various locations across the country.
- An organization who provides remote nursing support staff to healthcare organizations, selected Cloud Workspace because of the robust security control. They are able to lock down the devices of their remote users to prevent data from being stored on local drives, which reduces the risk of HIPAA, HITECH, and 21CFR Part 11 noncompliance. The security and agility of Cloud Workspace allows their remote users to ‘bring their own device’, eliminating the need to purchase expensive laptops for the entire remote staff.
By default, no applications, files, or desktops reside on user devices. Everything is hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud environment. These assets are only saved on your user devices if you need them there and change the settings. You have total control of your data and who is allowed access.
Cloud Customization
Ancero Cloud Workspace is not a one-size-fits-all service. Our team can customize a solution to meet your specific business requirements.
There are many different computing models and cloud variations to suit the needs of your environment, from hybrid cloud and Infrastructures-as-a-Service (IaaS) to virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Office 365 migration. The flexibility of customization ensures an exact fit and maximum cost efficiency.
You can also access Cloud Workspace in a number of ways – RDP Client, Virtual Private Network (VPN), or HTML5 secure browser-based connection. You might need a hybrid solution because some legacy applications, as well as applications that require significant processing power (Google Earth, CAD, Adobe Creative Suite), can’t cost effectively make the journey to the cloud just yet.
Depending on your business needs and industry regulations, you might need to be able to easily share data between the local network and the Cloud Workspace environment. You might want all data locked down within the cloud. The bottom line is that the choice is yours and we will work with you to accommodate your specific requirements.
Although virtual desktops are a primary focus with Cloud Workspace, we have the flexibility to deploy server– and storage–only solutions if you want to move your core infrastructure to the cloud and keep desktop workspaces local. In other words, you would just have servers, storage, and backup in the cloud. In this IaaS model, data resides in the cloud and is accessed via VPN. Our file sync-and-share preserves Microsoft permissions, folder structures, and Active Directory user identities, with mapped drives and file–locking capabilities.
There’s actually a fourth “C” that only Ancero Cloud Workspace can provide – confidence. We give you confidence that your data and applications will be available, secure, and performing to your expectations. We give you confidence that your employees will enjoy an exceptional user experience. Contact us for a demo of Cloud Workspace and find out how your organization can harness the power of the cloud with the leading provider of managed services in New Jersey.