Tomorrow, employees of your organization will most likely be opening Christmas presents and with absolute certainty many of them are going to receive Apple iPads from their loved ones. And with just as much certainty, they are going to return to the office in the next few days looking to not only connect those devices to the corporate network, but actually access corporate applications. The trouble is that most of those applications are running on Windows.
Fortunately, there is a way to simply give people access to those applications via a remote desktop application that not only supports iOS, but also Android and Windows 8 devices. Splashtop for Business is a remote access tool that can be centrally managed by corporate IT to give users of mobile computing devices access to Windows applications, including view of Microsoft Office files that have been optimized for tablets.
According to Splashtop CEO Mark Lee, Splashtop got its start by creating an iPad application for remotely accessing Microsoft Office. That application is already being used on millions of iPad devices. Splashtop for Business takes that one step further by providing a framework through which IT can centrally manage who gets access to what applications.
Lee says Splashtop for Business, which can be deployed on premise, gives internal IT organizations a much more robust and easier-to-manage virtual desktop alternative to traditional SSL-based virtual private network services in the cloud. Not only does it provide better access to applications such as Microsoft Office using secure encrypted tunnels, but Lee says it provides IT organizations with the ability to generate audit trails that identify who accessed what application when that is tied into Microsoft Active Directory.
Whether you favor Apple mobile computing devices or think the world is going to shift to Android or Windows 8 almost doesn’t matter. Thanks to the BYOD phenomenon, IT organizations are going to have to support a bevy of mobile computing devices for years to come. The issue facing IT organizations now is figuring how best to live with it.
