I am hearing more and more from customers about the growing need for their IT Helpdesk to support remote workers. This is adding to their support burden as the remote workers typically are operating in heterogeneous computing environments that vastly differ from what their internal helpdesk has been tasked with supporting in the past. Also, the tools the help desk has relied upon in the past to support employees cannot handle the challenges introduced by these remote worker environments especially when it comes to accessing their desktop remotely.
Remote workers can operate from many different types of locations – each having their own challenges for IT personnel trying to provide support. You may have workers that work from one location all the time – like their homes; workers that may be working from remote/branch offices – which often do not have IT staff on site; workers that may be working from customer sites, hotels, or even an Internet café. These workers will most-likely be using PCs with configurations differing from than those found on your LAN including multiple flavors of operating systems and browser – each bringing their own challenges. To top it off, all of them will likely be protected by a multitude of firewalls, proxies, or anti-malware software – all designed to keep you from gaining access to their PC.
Also, you may be one of the many companies that are rolling out VoIP telephony solutions for your remote workers. Many companies are choosing “soft phones” for their remote phone solution and you may have the need to remotely connect to their PC to configure and troubleshoot issues with these telephony solutions.
In the past, IT organizations could get away with using legacy solutions, like RDP, to remotely access and support employees. As more of the employees are becoming geographically dispersed, these legacy tools cannot be relied upon. It is burdensome for IT staff to use one tool for internal support and another for external support. So, as the lines continue to blur between what is deemed as internal and external remote support, I believe we will continue to see a rise in companies coming to us looking for one solution that can handle all their support needs.
The bottom line is that these remote workers need reliable access to internal applications and data on your network to complete work and stay productive. In the eyes of many company executives, the success of remote worker programs will be based on the productivity of these workers. Ultimately, the burden for maintaining this timely and consistent access to network resources for these workers falls on the shoulders of the IT help desk.
Photos by Markusram and Kai Hendry
Tags: remote worker
