The Demise of the Desktop

The internet isn’t just for watching YouTube videos or catching up on your Facebook profile page anymore. Over the last decade, the tech industry has been moving away from desktop applications in favor of web-based solutions. But why is that? Why is the web a better platform for hosting technology than a native desktop application? Two distinct benefits have emerged: safety and technical assistance.

Keeping Your Data Safe

When it comes to healthcare, data is everything. It wasn’t long ago that nine out of ten doctors stored their data by hand, in color-coded files. Times have certainly changed, and how you keep your healthcare data safe has taken a front seat.

It’s hard to imagine maintaining and storing electronic records for over a decade. Technology changes fast, and we swap out computers faster than we do jeans. Well… at least I do. Each new shift in technology can make it difficult to keep data organized – ensuring all data and files have transferred successfully and safely from desktop to desktop.

When your data is on the cloud as opposed to a desktop application, it is housed in safe hands. Potentially safer hands than our very own. Engineers, such as myself, pride ourselves on automation and security. We make it our business to keep your data safe and always accessible. We deliver high-availability, redundancy, encryption-at-rest, and fault tolerance.

Help is Closer than Ever

Online features equate to technical support being closer than ever. Remote desktop sessions, also known as remote assistance, was standard practice in times of past when technically supporting end-users. The end-user would grant technical support permission to remote desktop access, which means the end-user’s entire screen is shared. Through a remote screen, technical support teams can see everything being done by the end-user, allowing developers to document reproducible steps to record into a support ticket.

While remote assistance is still a useful tool, it is usually a last resort. It is not a scalable solution. If the application is only available client-side on the desktop, technical support can only access necessary data surrounding the problem during a live session. In this scenario, the end-user would need to remain available during the entire process – a process that can be quite lengthy. On top of this, developers rarely get the opportunity to assist in data collection during this critical time.

When your application is on the cloud, so is your data. By the time an end-user perceives an error, the error has already been logged and has alerted all necessary support parties. If the end-user has encountered a problem or bug, those symptoms can be reproduced by developers to then address the problem almost immediately and without much involvement of the end-user.