What is Cloudpaging and How Does It Save IT Resources?

Featured article by Nick Pandher – Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Desktop Solutions, Numecent

The demands and pressures on today’s IT departments continues to grow. Access to applications is essential to almost any business, and it is a difficult balance for today’s companies to pit reliable, efficient applications access against the need to keep IT costs from raging out of control.

Luckily, necessity is the mother of invention. New technologies and processes continue to emerge to help businesses achieve the balance between access, efficiency and cost controls. One such technology helping to relieve the pressure in IT is “Cloudpaging.”

What is Cloudpaging and how does it work?

A technology already helping millions of users worldwide, Cloudpaging allows businesses to deploy and provision applications in less time.

Here is how it works: Cloudpaging delivers Windows applications by “cloudifying” them – this essentially builds a compartmentalized application that is independent of a specific Windows version. This packaged compartmentalized application is delivered from the Cloud (on premise or hosted) to a local cache on a users’ device. Typically, less than 10 percent of the application is needed on the local cache to launch the application. Additional instructions are delivered on demand, one codepage at a time, as a user runs the application natively on a client device or on a VDI virtual machine. The local cache is persistent and stores all the features of the application the user needs over time – limiting what is pulled from the secure repository. Applications run at native speeds without installation, and usage can be monitored in real time to help manage ISV licensing.

Cloudpaging is compatible with nearly all Windows applications, providing higher compatibility than legacy solutions like Microsoft App-V It enables self-service access, providing an “app store” like delivery of requested applications.

What are the benefits of Cloudpaging?

Cloudpaging saves time IT departments spend on delivering and managing applications while reducing end user downtime to install or update applications. Users do not have to surrender their device to upload new applications or updates. At the same time, Cloudpaging enables IT departments to deploy the most up-to-date versions of applications to all users, and it allows companies to monitor and manage applications usage to control licensing costs. Cloudpaging greatly reduces demands on IT, avoiding the need to bundle applications with a desktop corporate image or incur the time to do manual installation of applications. Cloudpaging makes application delivery automatic or self-service, and it can reduce helpdesk tickets by up to 40 percent, allowing an IT department to do more with less.

What kinds of situations are ideal for Cloudpaging?

Cloudpaging is compatible with most applications, and it is highly scalable, so its uses are wide ranging. For example, Cloudpaging can be used to deliver complex applications that may not be able to be delivered via solutions like App-V and Thin App. Such applications would normally require manual installation, a huge time burden for IT and a cause for lost user productivity. For example, Parsons, an engineering and construction company, uses Cloudpaging to deliver hundreds of large CAD and engineering applications to employees and contractors, even in remote job sites. In the past, deploying such large, complex applications might require the user to surrender their device, causing days or even weeks of lost productivity. Cloudpaging provides near-instant deployment, keeping workers and contractors up and running.

With Cloudpaging an IT team can remove applications from the desktop corporate image. Applications are then delivered to users based on their Active Directory user or group credentials or selected from a self service app store-like interface. Removing applications from the desktop reduces the testing burden and allows updates in shorter refresh cycles, supporting both physical desktops/notebook and virtual desktop infrastructure with the same solution.

Cloudpaging makes OS migration easier. Since applications don’t live on the desktop, migrating to the next generation OS is simpler. Most apps move right over to a new OS due to foundational application virtualization technology in Cloudpaging – this reduces the burden of testing and supporting existing applications during an OS migration

In situations where users bring their own device (BYOD), Cloudpaging is an ideal technology. Cloudpaging can safely and securely provide applications to users, whether they be work-at-home employees, remote contractors, or students and faculty in an educational environment. Academic institutions like the Kingston University in the UK and the University of Michigan have used Cloudpaging to provide applications to BYOD users, including students and faculty. Cloudpaging has drastically reduced the demand on IT by simplifying application deployment, reducing help desk requests, and reducing the need to set up and maintain onsite computer labs to provide access to university applications. All of this has led to reductions in IT spending of as much as 50 percent.

Cloudpaging is technology of the future, available now

Cloudpaging is an innovative technology that simplifies the IT process for enterprises. It enables simpler image management, improves the ability to deploy complex applications, provides easier OS migration and enables BYOD support. All of this leads to lower IT costs and increased productivity. Cloudpaging is already supporting millions of user sessions each year, and its use will continue to grow as the need to distribute applications continues to expand.