The Google Search Appliance is well suited to most site search needs and it is possible to customize the front end seen by website visitors to produce a satisfactory basic interface with basic branding applied to it. However, in some situations it may be necessary to instead make API calls from a web page to retrieve search results and the format in which those results are returned might be a little more difficult to work with.
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.
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
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
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
There has also been a cost associated with our need to switch to another site search solution in the near future, due to Google ending support for the sppliance.
That said, we have so much support content that we owed it to our customers to offer a comprehensive search tool to help them find the most relevant content - and of course Google are the masters of this. However, it's worth noting that the alogorithms used on the GSA are far older than those used on google.com.
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
