AppsAnywhere Cloud Delivery: Any App from Any Browser

Higher ed IT has never been short of challenges: sprawling campuses, thousands of users, hundreds of applications, and the constant balancing act of budgets, licenses, and infrastructure. As students’ demands for flexibility grow, traditional delivery models are starting to show cracks, giving IT teams extra work and complexity to manage.

VDI promised a solution for higher ed: universal access, flexibility, simplified management. But it’s now part of the problem: it’s expensive, resource-hungry, and often overkill for most applications.

That’s where Cloud Delivery changes the game. By streaming applications directly into the browser, it reduces reliance on VDI, simplifies delivery, and right sizes costs. All the while giving students a faster, smoother experience – without the heavy lifting from IT.

What is Cloud Delivery and how does it work?

Cloud Delivery is AppsAnywhere’s next-generation approach to software delivery, designed specifically for higher education. Built directly into the AppsAnywhere platform, it allows institutions to stream software from the cloud, while working in harmony with existing deployment methods like VDI, SCCM, and app virtualization.

With AppsAnywhere, institutions can blend delivery methods to suit the application, user, and context, whether that’s making engineering software available in a campus lab, streaming productivity tools to a student’s laptop, or extending specialized applications to learners off-campus. Rather than relying solely on infrastructure-heavy or costly solutions, Cloud Delivery adds a lightweight, scalable, and cost-effective alternative.

This hybrid approach creates a flexible ecosystem for software delivery, with Cloud Delivery filling the gaps left by traditional models. For IT, that means:

• Any application on any device: launch Windows applications on macOS and ChromeOS
• Hands-off management: applications are packaged, hosted, updated and delivered centrally
• Only pay for what you use: consumption-based model design to lower usage
• Less reliance on VDI: only use VDI when absolutely necessary, using smarter prioritization
• Integration with your cloud storage such as OneDrive or Google Drive

And the best thing is that it’s a fully managed service. That means zero cloud infrastructure and zero management effort – it’s hosted and managed entirely by the expert teams at AppsAnywhere, hosted in secure cloud environments that are compliant with most regulatory obligations.

Continuous innovation: Cloud Delivery keeps getting smarter

Cloud Delivery is designed to evolve alongside the needs of higher education. Its latest enhancements remove barriers to access, simplify management, and give IT deeper control over how applications are delivered and used.

Greater session control

Cloud Delivery just got better with new session management features for both students and IT. Students benefit from clear notifications about open sessions, with simple options to relaunch or close them. For IT, a real-time view of active sessions makes it possible to identify usage, optimize resources, and manually end sessions for troubleshooting or license management. The result is improved usability for students and better oversight for administrators.

Deeper insights through reporting

Data-driven decisions are now more important than ever for IT, and Cloud Delivery provides the tools to make them. New reporting capabilities give IT visibility into application usage across the institution, covering session counts, concurrency trends, usage hours, and unique users. These insights enable IT teams to optimize license allocation, plan for peak demand, and measure the impact of cloud-delivered apps.

Why it matters for higher education IT

Cloud Delivery’s evolution isn’t just about technical upgrades; it’s about solving the real challenges faced by higher education IT. By simplifying updates, improving oversight, and providing actionable data, institutions can:

• Deliver a consistent student experience anywhere, anytime.
• Reduce IT costs without reducing capability.
• Improve security and compliance with easier updates.
• Support hybrid and remote learning with less infrastructure.
• Make smarter, data-backed decisions about licensing and resources.

A smarter, cheaper, better way forward

Higher education is evolving fast, and IT needs solutions that can keep pace. AppsAnywhere Cloud Delivery provides exactly that: a modern, flexible, and continuously improving way to deliver applications that meets the needs of today’s institutions and tomorrow’s learners.

By removing complexity from software delivery, Cloud Delivery allows IT to shift its focus from managing technology to enabling success, helping students access the tools they need, wherever and whenever they need them.