Is 2020 the year of the Chromebook?



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Many of us live in the browser these days, at least those of us who can take our work ‘home’ with us without much difficulty.

In an era of remote work, which was unanimously agreed to move to flexible work when the demands of a global pandemic have been left behind, the ‘laptop’ is the most practical device we could use to work.

Depending on nothing more than a good internet connection, the laptop is relatively inexpensive (not to say, cheap) option for employers. It’s lightweight, quick to start, and perfectly designed for an era of cloud-connected work.

The queen of these is the Chromebook. And if evidence was needed of how much the device fits into a world of ‘where the hell am I going to be working in two months?’, Google shipped 11.6 million units in the second quarter, representing an all-time high for a single quarter. Y 25% of total laptop shipments.

Much of this rise in popularity is due to the rise of distance learning in the education sector, which is still a major market for Chromebooks, given their cost and functionality. In addition to this objective demand in the education sector, laptop brands, facing disruptions in the Chinese supply chain, began to increase their orders for Chromebooks instead of more expensive Windows laptops.

Both the US and Japan treat Chromebooks as the key device in their remote learning policies in the K12 sector. Even before the pandemic, DigiTimes predicted that “[…] Chrome OS-based computing device shipments[s] [will] exceed those of a Windows-based one[s] in the global education sector in 2020 “.

But while education is a driving force for Chromebook sales, the retreating and staying away workforce could secure basic status for most white-collar organizations amid accelerating digitization taking place in a wide range of industries.

Chromebooks for business

Working on the internet has become the norm, and Chrome OS is specifically designed to run cloud-based applications.

Looking for a wider market share, Google recently features displayed to make it easier for IT administrators to deploy Chrome OS in their workforce.

These included a color-coded staging tool to establish which apps are ready to go on Chrome OS. At the same time, certain apps like Zoom and Salesforce have been certified to work well in Chrome. On top of that, an increasing number of Chrome web apps and extensions also work offline and will sync all your data to the cloud when you reconnect.

The company also made available a tool called Parallels for Chrome OS, which allows companies that depend on Windows applications to run them natively on Windows in a virtual machine.

Meanwhile, the company is making “zero-touch” configurations possible, in which manufacturers enroll devices with the correct domain, settings, policies, applications, and certifications and are shipped directly to the user, as if they were would have configured. by the organization’s IT department.

Building a workforce with $ 200 Chromebooks can also help protect your business from the rise of opportunistic cyberthreats targeting distributed workforces.

IT administrators can manage company users and devices from home with the Google admin console. This allows them to enforce policies such as MFA, configure device settings, and force the installation of applications and extensions where necessary.

Fast and flexible configuration, secure, low-cost and centrally managed; For cloud-centric organizations looking for a flexible work policy in the years to come, Chromebooks could become the standardized device for most employees whose work depends heavily on access to cloud-based applications.

Mark Jones



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