Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
The only reason I didn't gave the maximum rating is because it's not cheap, if you have a smaller company you can use some plugins instead depending on what you need. But I completely understand it's not safer than the Island browser. However, it would be great to have a simpler version for small companies too, that wouldn't require much testing to setup. Besides that, Island is my first choice when thinking about safety for remote workers.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
The agent can still see the customer's data that they need to help the customers, but without the ability to screenshot, copy and download outside the Island browser, that also prevent data leaks
The organization also saves money without the need of hiring only local employees, people can download it on their personal desktops
Can replace setups with VPN that are expensive or virtual desktops
Blocks unsafe websites that can also copy the client and customer data
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
It requires some training but it's very easy to use, as it's much like other famous browsers and it behave just as them. Even if it needs to be set up, you can set different policies for different users, that can be quite useful for bigger companies. However, some employees can feel a bit restricted as it has it's limitations to download or copy and paste
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
Chrome Remote Desktop is a good option to access the company desktop remotely, but it doesn't reduce the costs of the company since you'll still need to have two machines for it to work, you'll also need the same amount of IT staff and mantain a physical address. It can be a good option to companies that have only few agents remote but it's not good for hybrid or remote only employees
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
There is some costs to training people to use Island, and also to test and setup the browser, if you're initiating a business, this should be considered
Some advisors may not have a compatible hardware, this can add to the migration costs
No need to have a physical address or servers, since everything is managed from the clould it can significantly lower the costs
You can reduce the IT staff and maintenance costs too
