Google today announced the opening of an Early Access program for their new Chromebook Grab and Go initiative for the enterprise. Aimed at lowering IT costs and making devices available to anyone, the Grab and Go program provides Chromebooks charged and ready to go for anyone in the enterprise to check out and use for their laptop that day. Because nothing is stored locally on the device and all in the cloud, the only thing that users need are their login credentials and all their content is there. It is the ultimate example of the simplistic but powerful way that Chrome OS works today.
Chrome devices and Chrome Enterprise are the key ingredients that make this program so effective. With Grab and Go, centrally-located racks with fully-charged Chromebooks are available 24/7. As soon as an issue arises, employees can grab any of these devices and log in through their corporate account. Because their work is already stored in the cloud, they can jump back into projects immediately, as if they never left their old device.
The post from Google, IHS estimates that large enterprises lose up to $60 per year with IT downtime. The Chromebook Grab and Go program aims to throttle that back by having devices always available for workers when their primary laptop is down.
Google themselves have deployed the program in some of their own offices which have racked up over 30,000 unique users with 100,000 loans in the past year. Now Google wants to expand it to their enterprise customers. They have opened up an early access program for select enterprise customers to participate in and provide feedback on the program. It is likely that this will lead to it becoming a full fledged program for a wide range of Google customers over the course of 2019.
If you are interested in the program, you can get more details here and there is even a whitepaper available for review and consideration within your enterprise.
