Cost-effective and secure remote access in education
Remote access and remote learning are becoming an increasingly essential aspect of education for institutions at all levels and around the world.
More and more often, institutions are looking for a solution that enables remote access for students and staff in a secure, simple and cost-effective way. Parallels Secure Workspace helps educational institutions with this challenge and offers more benefits for both staff and students alike.
How do education customers use Parallels Secure Workspace?
Students access PC classrooms
Thanks to Parallels Secure Workspace, students are able to access their desktops in PC classrooms or computer labs while at home or anywhere else. They can easily and securely access their desktops — and the software running on it —via the browser using their own preferred device.
Remote working for teachers and staff
Administrative staff and teachers can work remotely from anywhere when using Parallels Secure Workspace. They can access desktops, applications and files on any device with an HTML5 browser. Of course, all of this happens in a secure and simple manner.
I cannot imagine a simpler way to tackle this issue, both for us as admins and for the users.
Raúl González López
Director of Customer IT Services UDLAP
Why use Parallels Secure Workspace for education?
Any device and BYOD
- Users are not limited by their own laptop’s or tablet’s horsepower. They can access any software running on on-campus desktops via their browser, even legacy software.
- Students can secure access to on-campus PCs from their own device. They just need a browser. No clients or plugins need to be installed on local devices.
Context-awareness
- User authentication in Parallels Secure Workspace happens via user groups in the AD.
- IT admins can provide restricted access based on various levels like user group (students, administrative staff, or teachers) or feature (local printing, file sharing).
- Furthermore, admins can define restrictions based on the context in which the access occurs.
Budget and scalability
- Parallels Secure Workspace has a better cost-benefit ratio than its in-market counterparts like VPN or Citrix, and it comes with built-in multi-factor authentication (MFA) included. So, it is an ideal solution, even for tight educational IT budgets.
- Parallels Secure Workspace offers concurrent user licenses, making it simple to keep license usage under control. It’s easy to scale up or down when necessary.
Quick setup and roll out
- The solution can be set up in a very short time, even for larger groups. This makes a switch to remote learning easy, for both the teachers and students. Of course, it’s no hassle for the IT team either.
- Parallels Secure Workspace is a simple platform for education. The training is minimal for both students and academic staff. Schools experience fewer problems and support tickets. When tickets do come in, support engineers can easily take over the end user session or check the audit logs.
Audit logs
- Admins can use the extensive audit log and dashboard to follow up on students and see their activity in the workspace during online classes.
Data security
- There’s no local data on the end user devices nor a direct connection between the local device and the backend infrastructure. Everything happens and stays in the browser.
- Parallels Secure Workspace can help you become GDPR compliant, so working with personal data of students or even minors can happen securely.
Give students remote access to classrooms and PC rooms in no time
Many schools, colleges, and universities have large PC labs or rooms that consist of hundreds or even thousands of computers that are running very specific software. With remote teaching, students need to access this specific software from anywhere outside of their school’s PC rooms or classrooms. But how can this be accomplished?
When students need to access these (often legacy or custom-written) applications from home, there are some challenges for the institutions involved. They don’t have the resources to purchase the specific educational software for every student, nor are they able to provide the necessary hardware for each and every one of them.
Luckily, these challenges can be solved by Parallels Secure Workspace
With Parallels Secure Workspace, it’s possible to enable very simple yet highly secure remote access to the desktops located in an institution’s PC labs or rooms. You can let students access the desktops from their own devices. The solution acts as an HTML5 gateway and translates the desktops into HTML5. This way they can securely access them in the outside world using their own laptop or tablet.
