Google Introduces Chromebooks For Work Subscription at $50 Per Year

The new annual subscription service will be initially available in the US and Canada, with the company claiming more regions will follow.

Google, apart from announcing the new subscription service, also announced a bevy of features for enterprise with Chromebooks for Work. The company stresses that the new features are specifically focused on "improving identity, manageability, virtualization, and performance."

Announcing the news, Saswat Panigrahi, Product Manager, Chrome for Work said in a blog post, "Today, we're taking a big step toward making it even easier for companies to select Chromebooks as their device of choice by announcing features specifically focused on improving identity, manageability, virtualization, performance and pricing."

Some of the highlight features include single sign-on, that allows users to sign-on with the same credentials and identity used by the enterprise. The blog post details, "This feature uses the universal SAML standard and works with most of the major identity providers including CA SiteMinder, Microsoft AD FS, Okta, Ping Identity, SecureAuth, and SimpleSAMLphp." The company also added multiple sign-in, which will allow users to securely and quickly switching between work and personal accounts on the Chromebook.

Some of the other Chrome for Work features detailed by the blog post included, "Improved certificate management for wireless networks: Businesses, schools and government institutions can now easily provision Chromebooks with client certificates to access 802.1X EAP-TLS wireless networks and mutual TLS protected web resources."

With the new Admin Console, enterprises can manage certificates to distribute to employees. It adds, "Using the Admin Console, IT admins can pre-configure their secure networks, push certificate management extensions and pre-select certificates to be used with certain websites and networks."

It also adds expanded Chrome management for devices and improved virtualization options.

"Starting today, customers can purchase all of these advanced features, management, and support through a new annual subscription option of $50 per device per year. This new pricing option is available first in the US and Canada, with more regions to follow. We're also supporting licensing portability, which means if you lose or replace a Chromebook you can easily apply your existing license to a new device," Panigrahi added.