If the Chrome “experiment” isn’t enough to convince enterprise IT it’s time to get really serious about Disaster Recovery, I don’t know what will.
For those of you out of the loop, last week Chrome dev’s pushed out an “experiment” that primarily impacted users accessing Chrome in RDS terminal environments. And who, might you ask, primarily accesses Chrome in RDS? The largest of enterprises, of course.
So, try another browser? Nope, not in these tightly locked down environments. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of employees – largely call centers – unable to do their jobs for two days.
So, how do we prevent something like this from happening again?
There’s a lot of chatter around this topic. One idea is to give enterprises the option to opt-out of such experiments. However, I align with reddit user ShadowPouncer on this one –
“…corporate IT shops need to stop pretending that only one web browser exists.”
Personally, I downloaded the Brave browser this morning, and I am already impressed with the speed and the neat little pop-up that tells me exactly how many creepy-trackers they’ve blocked on any given site.However, as much as I agree with ShadowPouncer that corporate IT shops need to offer a second option for web browser, they question is how to offer that back up, or DR, browser in the event of another Chrome or Firefox or Opera or even IE – failure.
It’s not as simple as installing a second browser onto the Windows terminal. Often, in these types of environments, users are so locked down that they don’t even open the browser on their own – they are launched directly into the app. Completely bypassing the desktop, and any option of loading the app in an alternative browser.
The only way to offer the second browser, while maintaining corporate security compliance, is to create a DR pool of desktops within your environment that provide access to the needed corporate app from an alternative browser.
Using a connection broker with advanced user policy settings, the sysadmins at these affected enterprises could switch their users over to the DR pool, and have their call center back online in minutes – rather than the days spent waiting for Chrome to get their *stuff* together.
And, thankfully, the cloud is now a perfect place for that DR pool. By leveraging the cloud, you can switch users over to their backup desktop only for the length of the DR event, and then shut down the DR environment after the event passes. Don’t build a DR environment that sits in your data center forever. Simply rent it in the cloud, only when you need it.
To learn more about how to leverage the cloud for backup desktops, or any type of VDI solution, join our webinar.