Remote solutions for a remote workforce

With remote work becoming the norm in the wake of the global pandemic, a new business challenge emerged. Mac users needed access to remote workspaces for general business use that could be easily and effectively managed by central IT departments. Moreover, MacStadium needed to create innovative ways to deliver a remote workspace without compromising the Mac user experience that has made the platform so dominant in the personal computing space.

To meet this challenge, we drew on our hard-won expertise in the macOS virtualization space that has historically centered around DevOps in addition to continuous integration for iOS and macOS developers. Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) has been put through the paces by some of the world’s most demanding enterprise-level software development teams, so we knew it was the right foundation to begin building this new Mac for business platform.

Our core engineers understood that for such a platform to meet the demands of the market, it would have to scale well and provide centralized control of virtual machine images and access. This is also critical to avoid burdening IT departments with one-off solutions for managing access to organizational resources.

Presenting Orka Workspace and Cloud Access

With those factors in mind, Orka Workspace was born. It is, in essence, an IT-friendly control layer built on top of the Orka platform that allows IT teams to define user workspaces with macOS VM images, and that only includes customized, IT-authorized access to end users. It also allows IT teams to directly invite organization employees to use ephemeral Mac resources that are securely accessible via any web browser.

Orka Workspace is currently in beta, but it comes on the heels of another more mature, parallel remote Mac solution also developed by MacStadium and in conjunction with HP Teradici called Cloud Access. Cloud Access touts the Teradici PCoIP lossless compression protocol, making it a perfect solution for processor-intensive Mac workloads such as video editing and video game development on a bare-metal, cloud-hosted Mac machine.

Both solutions include options for MDM-based, central IT control, and they continue to grow in popularity within the market and their included feature sets through open dialogues with users around the world.

Takeaways

In the wake of the global pandemic, the business landscape is shifting to include a much larger percentage of remote employees. This fact, combined with the market demand for a Mac-specific solution, has led MacStadium to develop two distinct remote Mac solutions – Orka Workspace and Cloud Access.

Orka Workspace is built on top of MacStadium’s proven, Kubernetes-based Orka platform, which was developed with scalability at the forefront. Cloud Access, on the other hand, was developed in conjunction with Teradici, and it leverages their lossless compression protocol, making it an excellent solution for remote, processor-intensive macOS workloads such as video editing and video game development.