It has become increasingly difficult for us to deal with an increasing number of remote workers who require more assistance. More people needed to work from home to be productive, and more businesses either allowed employees to work from home or were forced to support this to stay afloat. As a result, there has been an increase in the amount of money spent on IT in order to support remote workers over time.
While this is the case, there are still numerous issues with service management and application life cycles that make implementing new processes or changes more difficult. These issues are not related to the pandemic itself. Where these processes were not properly documented in the past, all of the work that has been done over the past year may have exacerbated the problems.
What systems and procedures are in place to support remote workers today?
Increasing home working and expenditure on technology to enable remote workers is unquestionably a necessity. Whether you have a large or small number of workers working from home, the change necessitated new ways of working and less control over operations than IT teams are used to. After the initial challenges of getting users set up and productive at home, the longer-term issues surrounding IT service management (ITSM) are now a valid subject of worry.
One challenge is figuring out what your organization currently supports. An accurate image of the assets that employees use for work purposes helps with long-term management. This has gotten more challenging as teams struggle to track how much money is taken out of the workplace by employees working remotely from home and how much is added by personal or department credit card spending. Managing users and managing service and remote worker support operations become challenging without reliable data. It can also affect operations like software license management. If you couldn’t keep up with all the changes during the lockdown, start over to get a better understanding of the scenario. With this information, you can start planning further.
Then there’s the question of how diversified IT has become. Your procurement and provisioning methods are less controlled; thus a simpler set of assets, apps, or operating systems won’t assist. Use of more operating systems, hardware, or devices than typical. It is possible to overwork your support staff by using more service software apps that require less help during installation and updates. Neither the old nor the new will be better or worse as a result of the transformation. Making an accurate asset list and planning how to support new equipment and services takes time when helping remote workers.
What is being used by whom?
The other challenge, in addition to all of these new IT assets, is determining who is actually using these devices. While the user may have their own devices, it is possible that they are not connected to the corporate network or that they only connect on occasion. Using the company’s computer system, how can you be confident that everyone who works from home is who they claim they are?
The typical user identity and password technique are no longer sufficient. Not only do consumers struggle to remember strong passwords, but IT personnel must ensure that their credentials are not being exploited. This involves the use of identity and access management (IAM). This includes everything from a network directory to how you limit access to cloud-based services and everything in between. Traditional Kerberos and RADIUS for on-premise networks, and SAML for managing access to web and cloud applications, are among the options available to IT administrators.
Also, the gadgets themselves must be considered. Users may desire to work from personal cell phones or tablets in addition to company-owned devices. Users can show that they are authorized to access company applications and data by securing their devices with security certificates. If a device lacks the required certificate, denying access is an easy approach to de-provision access while maintaining application security.
As soon as you’ve implemented authentication and authorization procedures, you can think about how to make the workflow process more user-friendly. This entails taking into consideration the context in which users may be operating.
Everyone in the office would log in and use any applications that they had available to them. When people work from home, they can still have the same level of access with the help of IT infrastructure and operations but you may want to consider how you can make this more manageable over time.
One example is the potential of users working from different locations. Keeping an eye on IP addresses is important for workplace safety, especially when some employees only work from the office or from their own computers. You may make the support process easier and safer by following these steps, even if you can’t whitelist every IP address associated with your home office. By limiting access from IP addresses in other countries such as France, Germany, China, and India, you automatically solve a security issue even if the user’s valid credentials have been stolen or guessed correctly.
Travel will be required by some businesses in order to provide support to remote workers. For some personnel, requiring a second factor of authentication, such as a one-time password, may be adequate. Another option is to link access to a specific device so that only the correct personal credentials on the correct device will be accepted as valid credentials. In designing workflows, always keep in mind that they should serve as a tool to aid rather than obstruct the user while also safeguarding any firm assets or data that needs to be safeguarded. Using these processes to support remote workers is a natural progression.
As the pandemic fades, employees will have more opportunities to engage in hybrid working methods. While some organizations want all items to be returned to the office, others are investigating alternative ways of working.
IT teams will have to adapt in order to support this. Contractors, for example, may never set foot in the office again and are perfectly comfortable using their own equipment and devices to access company applications. Others will expect their employers to provide them with the tools they need to be productive wherever they are required to work, including in an office, at home, or from a remote location. As a result, there won’t be a single solution that works for everyone. Instead, systems must be reworked to accommodate remote workers and work-from-home arrangements.
The asset lifecycle will change as a result of these modifications. It was common for new hires to be given a work computer with an operating system image and default apps tailored to their profile and job requirements. But what if employees aren’t compelled to report to work. The Apple Business Manager program, available on Apple devices, is one solution. Drop-shipping a machine to a customer is made possible by allowing businesses to create their own brand image. Windows devices can also be configured in the same way. As long as IT workers are kept under control, the end goal is to make the user experience as frictionless as possible. Keeping this in mind, identity management will continue to expand in relevance within service delivery and management. Every user will need to be onboarded, updated, and de-provisioned individually. When employees may never return to work, let alone hand over their machines to IT for updates, being prepared is critical. Instead, we must evaluate how to maintain good user functionality while implementing suitable levels of governance and compliance for IT infrastructure.
It is a delicate balancing act to provide support to remote workers. But that in the future, it will be important for ITSM, service management, and information technology. Rather than focusing solely on how to keep the lights on, IT organizations now have the opportunity to rethink the results they want to achieve and the path that will take them to get there.
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