With the number of tech-savvy users rising rapidly, public access computing has become a popular choice for global entities across different industrial verticals.
Such internet-powered, shared workstations available for public access are now a common sight in educational institutes, retail organizations, banking areas, healthcare organizations, and public libraries.
By offering instant access to digital resources and information, these devices have been playing a critical role in enhancing customer engagement, improving organizational efficiency and ensuring service availability.
As the organizational dependence on such computer-based operations continues to grow, the IT team is faced with daunting tasks. IT must ensure maximum availability and operability of devices in these multi-use computing environments within a very constrictive budget. However, the very fact that many individuals are operating one workstation — introduces multifarious challenges that the IT department have to cope with, as well frequently.
IT challenges increase in managing multi-user computing environments.
Workstations in multi-user computing environments are used for a variety of purposes on a daily basis, which makes these susceptible to various unauthorized changes and threats.
Users of these shared systems may, advertently or accidentally, make changes in the crucial system elements that leave a lasting, and often, damaging impact on the performance and functionality of these devices.
A user can, for example, delete system-critical operating files, alter the admin-approved system settings or download and run any unlicensed software during their individual sessions. As a consequence of such disruptive changes, these systems become too slow to respond or the system will malfunction frequently.
If two or more such workstations suddenly go out of order, it increases the workload on the IT department.
The IT support team often rush to the site and perform maintenance activities to get to the core of the issue. Depending on the severity of the problem, they end up stretching their resources and indulge in laborious and extremely time-intensive recovery work to get the affected systems back to a workable state. This adds to the total downtime, generates dissatisfaction among the users, and results in the excessive expenditure that often throws IT budget for a toss.
Issues like users installing and running unlicensed software can leave the IT team to grapple with license compliance challenges, thus raising concerns over budget allocation and utilization. Inappropriate or disruptive use of public endpoints also increases the risk of malware and other cyber threats that can incur excessive IT management and support cost.
With compressed budget and limited human resources, it becomes increasingly difficult for the IT team to ensure effective endpoint management in a multi-user computing environment.
To lower capital and operating expenses, IT professionals often take recourse to place restrictions on the users’ ability to access and make changes in these shared workstations. However, such a restrictive approach to system management can severely curtail the computing experience of the users. It is also unsuitable for any devices that are used in mission-critical operations, as observed in healthcare facilities and federal agencies.
To better cope with the challenges of a multi-user computing environment, the IT team need to deploy an effective system restoration mechanism that can bring back malfunctioning systems to their optimal functionality in the shortest time frame possible. Software solutions based on reboot to restore technology can enable IT managers to maximize system performance and availability with ease and achieve maximum cost savings.
“Reboot to Restore” technology can minimize IT costs in multi-user computing environments?
Solutions leveraging reboot to restore technology are specifically designed to revert systems to their original state on reboot. Once deployed on the shared endpoints, such system restore software solutions allows IT administrators to set up the desired configuration state as per the business requirement and security standards.
This configuration is thereby marked as the baseline for future reference which the IT admins can control and modify from time to time. Reboot to restore technology functions entirely in the background without affecting how the users choose to access the concerned systems.
A reboot can, for example, customize the desktop or download any software to perform their work. However, once the machines are rebooted, the reboot to restore capabilities of such solution rolls back the system to the admin-defined baseline and deletes all user-session data, thus helping the IT team keep devices in a clean and optimal state.
Reboot restore software solutions prevent the systems from deviating from the IT-specified baseline and reestablishes it with each reboot.
This enables IT managers to maintain standardized configuration on all devices in the network with minimal efforts. The instant removal of all user-generated changes, accidental or malicious, considerably reduces the chances of any system malfunctioning or damage. As a consequence, the IT team can ensure virtually zero downtime, which drastically lessons IT spending on system maintenance in multi-user computing environments.
Solutions harnessing the power of reboot to restore technology allows the users to work autonomously.
Executing this kind of system restore software is quite easy and does not require any technical knowledge. If any shared system goes down in the middle of a session, all users need to do is to restart the system to revert it back to its clean and original state. This dramatically reduces users’ dependency on tech support and ensures business resilience even in the face of crisis.
On the other hand, this provides the IT department with more time to engage in complex technical tasks, which further lowers the cost associated with IT support and resource utilization. With reboot to restore solutions in place, IT managers can offer users with complete access to the devices without any concerns over system integrity and security.
Such solutions make the IT-designated system configuration immune to all unauthorized changes and elements, thus ensuring high availability of workstations in a multi-user computing environment and reducing IT support costs.
