With the advancement of technology and the growing number of tech-savvy users, public computing environments have become increasingly appealing to global entities across sectors. An internet-powered computing environment that can facilitate and support multiple users have become a common sight in workplaces, public libraries, educational institutes, airports, transport terminals, banking areas, and healthcare organizations. Providing seamless access to a wide pool of digital resources, public computers are now being used for a variety of tasks.
With the ever-increasing popularity of these public computing environments, ensuring all-time availability of such systems has become the topmost IT priority. IT managers need to ensure that users get instant access to necessary data and services, without interruption. However, there are multiple challenges that IT professionals managing public computing environments have to frequently cope with. These raise concerns over system integrity and performance.
Ensuring System Availability in a Public Computing Environment: Key Challenges
Systems open to multiple users can face a higher degree of negligence due to the lack of ownership. Users of public systems may end up doing alterations that can leave a lasting or damaging impact on their performance. An accidentally deleted application or even minor changes in the configuration can interfere with the optimal functionality of such systems.
With time, these systems start showing signs of malfunctioning, causing inconvenience and delay in service. IT professionals responsible for managing public computers often have to stretch their resources and invest additional effort to bring those devices back to a functional state. It may take long hours of troubleshooting and costly system recovery work, which considerably increases the load on the IT team.
Visitors downloading and using unauthorized software applications on the system can increase license compliance risks. Inappropriate use or random transferring of data on the public systems by users also heightens the likelihood of cyber-attacks, malware infiltration, and data thefts.
With too many devices to manage and monitor, IT managers must take recourse to curtail user access to the system, in order to prevent them from performing unwanted activities. However, such a restrictive approach is unsuitable for the management of systems that are used for mission-critical or emergency purposes. For example, public computers in healthcare institutions or federal agencies that cater to the interest of multiple beneficiaries, have to be maintained in an open and available state.
IT professionals need automated and instant solutions to cope with the ever-increasing challenges posed by public computing environments. System restore software that possesses the capability of bringing back systems to an operable state within a few minutes, can help IT managers ensure business continuity under pressing circumstances. Software based on reboot to restore technology can enable the IT managers to maintain public computers in an ever-functional state with very minimal efforts.
Reboot to Restore Technology: Helping IT Professionals Ensure 24/7 System Uptime in Public Computing Environments
Reboot to restore based solutions are designed to revert a system to its defined configuration upon a reboot. Such System Restore software solutions allow the IT managers to determine the desired configuration state, which is then marked as the baseline. When the system is restarted, such solutions rollback the configuration to that admin-defined baseline. Moreover, the traces of all user-induced changes, accidental or malicious, are completely wiped out with each reboot. This essentially means that the devices are always maintained in a clean state.
The benefits of deploying reboot to restore solutions in public computing environments can be numerous. IT professionals can conveniently deploy such solutions on the networked computers and decide on a baseline per the situational requirements, or corporate security standards. They also do not have to impose any user access restrictions for system management. As a result, users can always work in an open and flexible computing environment and access the system freely without any concerns over the implication of their session activities.
By restoring the preserved configuration on reboot, these System Restore software solutions enable the IT team to maintain standardized configuration in all public computers and keep them at their peak functionality at all times. The instant elimination of all user session data on reboot drastically lessens the chances of system damage, thus reducing downtime and associated cost for system maintenance. Public systems always remain in an optimal state and available to the users, no matter how those are used.
The effective system restoration capabilities of such reboot to restore solutions also empower users to work independently. For example, an employee at a retail store does not have to wait for any IT professional to arrive and fix issues when any system malfunctions. A simple restart can revert the system to its optimal functionality, which greatly decreases their dependency on IT support. Such solutions also provide IT team managing public computers with more free time, which they can invest in managing more complex technology jobs.
With reboot to restore technology in place, public libraries, government organizations, and schools who have deployed public systems can strike a balance between safe computing usage and keeping a non-restricted computing environment for users. The systems are protected against multi-level threats and are easily recoverable from issues, such as software corruption, Operating System (OS) damage and configuration drifts.
Solutions harnessing the power of reboot to restore technology can boost up workstation performance and availability in public computing environments while providing greater flexibility to users accessing the systems.
