Google Chrome Enterprise reviews, rating and features 2023 | PeerSpot

Pros and Cons

What is our primary use case?

The idea is that if you look at an exam room now in a departmental clinic, in a hospital, you’ll typically find that nurses and techs are going room to room with a laptop and they’re not running a wired workstation. It’s easier to run Chromebook. That’s just now catching on. Quite a few institutions are starting to move this way and the reasoning is that if you’re talking about lightweight cloud applications, for the most part, it runs very well. If they’re running Epic EHR in the cloud or Cerner or whatever, it’s much easier to run it on something like a Chrome OS-type situation where it’s secure. You don’t have anything on that device essentially.

How has it helped my organization?

I’m doing a big push towards healthcare using Chromebooks due to the fact that it is so easy to manage the GCP, sort of the admin console, for deploying VDI and in some cases with Parallels, if it has to have high-end Windows applications running on it.

You can put together fairly cheap laptops or tablets that can be in the hands of the nursing staff and run pretty efficiently.

What is most valuable?

I really like the fact that Chrome OS is super secure, easy to manage, and so forth. 

It’s portable and inexpensive. 

Chrome Enterprise is really easy to deploy and manage.

One of the beauties of something like Chrome OS is that, on the data lake side and on the cloud side, everything is web-based. You’re looking at web APIs. It makes it easy to get to any dashboards or any systems without having to have any specialized software. A plus for a Chrome OS is the cloud-type operating system.

What needs improvement?

You still need to have a pretty good understanding of GCP to deploy it properly. Their enterprise system is not just an easy thing where you can run it from the admin console. You’re still running it as a GCP software as a service.

They do make Chromeboxes – small form factor computers – which have a little more horsepower. The question I have on this and going forward at using Chrome OS in the healthcare side if you’re looking at these workstations that are doing high-powered rendering and volumetric rendering, and take a lot of horsepower in the GPU side if they’ll be able to handle that.

They haven’t really addressed that. That’s a little bit trickier. You could run Chrome OS and you could do Chrome RDP to a virtual machine running with a lot of horsepower in the cloud as your rendering engine. You could do that, however, the tricky part about that is that a lot of times over the years we’d use Teradici or we’d use PC over IP for these high intensive graphic stations. That’s still a kind of disconnect for me on the Chrome OS side. I have a mix in some hospitals where they’ll say, yeah, we want Chrome OS for all the nursing computers, however, all the radiology computers have to be OnPrem Z series, Hewlett Packard works stations, or whatever. It’s just not across the board perfect for every department’s needs yet.

When you get to the CTL-qualified laptops for Chrome OS running Parallels and running Windows applications on it, those become higher-end machines. That’s okay – there’s a handful of users that need to use real Windows applications, however, typically, that’s not the case. I’m sort of trying to work through that right now. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I haven’t used the solution for that long. I’m in the early stages. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is very good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is great.

My prediction is four years from now you’ll see a Windows and a Mac OS that are completely cloud. They’ll be cloud-based. Everybody’s going to have to go down that road because the problem with, even with zero trust and a really solid perimeter for healthcare in general, or for FinTech, or for financials is banking, it’s really hard to manage ransomware at this point. The more open-ended stuff you’ve got the more problems. The tax surface is a problem. We all know multi-cloud environments can be great, however, you’ve got to be on top of your management of them from the IM side and the security cybersecurity standpoint. 

Therefore, when you’re talking about something like this, where you’re alleviating a lot of that risk, that’s what’s going to propel this forward. Google is the first to really kind of embrace it. That said, you’re going to see everybody else follow suit. It makes sense. Why do you want to put all your horsepower in the device? You’re running it off a virtual machine or a container in the cloud somewhere.

How are customer service and support?

I have not been involved with technical support. I’m sort of in the early stages of that, with GCP and with Google Chrome. I’m just really excited about it due to their track record. From a cybersecurity, maintenance, and support standpoint I hear they have been really good. I’ve just really gone on the journey here to start. I put that forward as my solution. I’m doing a couple of new hospitals right now and I’m just at the beginning.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and it is easy to deploy.

What’s my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing of the solution is very good. it’s relatively inexpensive as compared to different setups you could do.

What other advice do I have?

I’d advise those considering the solution that part of the process is training some staff to have a good foundation in GCP to understand what they’re getting involved in as it’s easy to say you’re running it off the admin console and it’s a pretty easy point and click, fill in the box, whatever you want to, however, you really need to understand the spend and the concept to the GCP console. That’s kind of like AWS saying, hey man, here’s our health lake, our data lake, and all you got to do is put whatever instances you want in there and whatever connectors you want and APIs, and we’ll take care of it. Well, if you don’t really understand AWS suspend and workflow, you can get yourself in trouble quickly.

You could have too much on the EBS side or too much on the block storage side. It’s the same thing when you’re looking at Chrome OS. One of the important aspects of it on the Enterprise is to also look at GCPs management and how all this is taking place, as some of those applications that you’re going to be running aren’t all necessarily in the Google store. 

If you’re going to host an EMR like Cerner, Allscripts, Meditech, Epic, or whatever it is in the cloud, then that’s going to be a different approach on how you access that from your Chrome OS. Therefore, my recommendation is if you’re going to go that way, make sure your IT staff has an understanding of GCPs processes and how that all works from a fundamental standpoint.

I’d rate the product at a seven out of ten from what I’ve seen so far. 

As far as I’m concerned, I have to be neutral. I don’t really make any pretense subjectivity. Honestly, I’m an IT guy. I’m also a medical guy, and I’m also an AB guy and a network guy in general. I cover a lot of bases and a lot of times what I’m looking for is a distributed system that can handle a lot of high-end workstation virtual desktops. We’re running Nvidia CUDAs and whatever we had to run in the background to be used for rendering, Multislice CTs, et cetera.

It’s got some pitfalls. You understand that when you’re not running full-blown applications. You’re still at a disadvantage for certain things. Also, certain specialty groups and departments may have to bring in software that is a standalone type approach. You have got to figure out, can you access that from a browser, a secure browser or not? There are some disconnects as to who’s in the flock or not.

Whereas, if you’re running in a total Windows environment and you’re running Windows Server 2022 or 2019, and you’re running whatever you want as Hyper-V sessions, that’s easier to do. There’s a trade-off when you look at what the capabilities are. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.