Alchemy Tech Group has helped many of our customers address the challenges of COVID19 and we’ve identified common areas that need attention post deployment or expansion of WFH solutions.
Here are 8 work from home challenges that continue to surface and Alchemy’s advice on how to remediate:
1. We relaxed some security policies in the interest of rapid deployment, and are now concerned about the resulting security posture.
Alchemy Insight: Now that things are stable, it is a good time for an external penetration test, assessment or health check to understand and correct any potential exposure. We have several offerings and can tailor one specific to your areas of concern.
2. Our users have a wide range of endpoints at home. How can we address compatibility issues and security concerns with home PC’s?
Alchemy Insight: Virtual Desktops and Virtual Applications can eliminate compatibility challenges with the non-standardized hardware and operating systems of your remote users. Our Rapid Assist Program can help you quickly deploy virtual desktop solutions. The most secure and consistent method to connect to those virtual environments is with IGEL’s UD pockets, which we ship to all users. It allows them to securely boot into the Linux based OS, and we can also set up Endpoint Analysis (EPA) or Pre-authentication policies to only allow domain joined or thin client devices to connect.
3. Many of our users are dependent on their office PC to access specialized software and company data to remain productive, but can’t go into the office.
Alchemy Insight: Citrix Remote PC enables the employees to remotely access their office PC from any device or location so they can maintain the same level of productivity they had when they were physically in the office. They can log in and remote control their office desktop as if they were right in front of it.
4. We have several manual processes that require access to applications in the datacenter or on the corporate network, without the possibility to leverage remote workers to complete those tasks.
Alchemy Insight: Robots are immune to COVID-19. Now is the ideal time to start looking at robotic process automation (RPA) to automate high volume, repetitive processes with a software robot that can work in your datacenter or on your network. Alchemy’s RPA quickstart offering can achieve rapid results. Simply provide us access to a virtual machine (VM) with the required applications and we can quickly deploy a software bot to perform most manual processes, keeping those actions within your datacenter without end user involvement.
5. We have provided virtual desktop solutions to our remote workforce, but now performance is becoming an issue.
Alchemy Insight: Now that we’ve moved beyond licensing capacity, user education and support enablement, focus on platform performance must be a part of daily operations. Solutions like ControlUP and others can help with predicting performance impacts, capacity needs and end user productivity targets that should be achieved. Alchemy can help you select and deploy the right solution for your performance management needs.
6. How can we address our infrastructure capacity being stressed by the large increase in work from home requirements?
Alchemy Insight: This is an excellent opportunity to explore private, public and/or hybrid cloud platforms, whether it’s Nutanix, AWS, Azure, Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) or Citrix Cloud. The public and private cloud solutions are typically accessible with little disruption to existing infrastructure components and target linear scale out allowing for more economical scaling. We can help you assess and deploy the right cloud solution to burst during this crisis and scale back down when you are able to resume normal operations.
7. We can’t leverage virtualized desktops, so we are stuck trying to troubleshoot end user machines. Is there an easier way?
Alchemy Insight: We recommend using a remote support tool to allow you to remote control your end user machines. BeyondTrust’s Secure Remote Support (Powered by Bomgar) is a great tool for remote helpdesk and lets your team view and take control of the endpoint to quickly troubleshoot those desktop support issues.
8. We are using Okta for MFA, but our users are complaining about having to multi-factor too often.
Alchemy Insight: Leverage Okta’s Adaptive MFA features with risk-based policies to create intelligent policies based on login context. Also consider a passwordless authentication experience. Our Okta experts can guide you on how to enable these features.
