Confirmed cases of COVID-19 (or coronavirus) continue to rise globally, and health departments have done much to attempt to control the outbreak. To prevent transmission of the virus, there are restrictions in place, including travel, avoidance of mass gatherings, and remote working. Many events have been cancelled or postponed. The business impact is enormous, and companies are challenged to maximize employee welfare while keeping their operations running.
With employee safety in mind, many organizations have responded by asking employees to work from home. This may sound easier than it is, and it raises a few questions for managers. If you can’t see Tom, Tina, and Harry, how do you know they’re working? Are the computer hardware and applications misbehaving? Do they need remote support? Proper remote work preparation includes communicating the right guidelines and policies, ensuring accountability, and having secure and easily accessible IT services.
Such unexpected global situations have made the reliance on IT tools increasingly important for business continuity. IT departments must ensure security and make remote working easy and productive. There are many tools to help achieve this if network and application performance is acceptable. The challenge arises when IT services take a hit. Organizations need to quickly restore services while continuing to work remotely. To provide a seamless remote working environment, companies need strong IT support and
help desk environments.
While we hope the COVID-19 situation is resolved soon, it’s caused IT departments to reevaluate their existing support tools, ensuring employees continue to be productive and support teams can respond to issues and resolve them quickly.
Here Are Five of the Most Common Criteria for Remote Support Tools:
- Ease of use: How easy is it for an employee to raise a support ticket and how long does it take to receive a response?
- Integration: How well are remote support and service desk tools integrated?
- Access levels: Can the tools access sleeping devices, powered-off devices, and devices outside of the firewall?
- Multiple platform control: Can you remotely control Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X computers, laptops, and servers from a single console?
- Access controls: Can you set permissions for accessing remote computers based on user roles or use Microsoft Active Directory integration in centralized mode?
Tools enabling remote work have been around for many years. In a Google search, I received more than 4 billion results in 0.54 seconds. Emails, messages, teleconferencing, softphones, file-sharing platforms, virtual teams—you name it, and someone is ready to sell it. As companies continue to invest in remote working tools, it’s critical to review how well-equipped IT departments are to support employees needing this technology.
