Your Checklist To Being Remote Desktop Ready
Security, Technology, Telecommuting, Workplace
Thinking about remote desktop software? Review this checklist as you assess your business and prepare to become remote desktop ready.
Remote desktop software is simple, powerful, and easy to use — which is all the more reason to take care when rolling it out. This short checklist gives you a handy tool for getting the basics right from the start.
Any software that combines simplicity with power needs careful consideration. While the best remote access solutions increase both user productivity and data security, there are a few areas where a little prep can increase your gains.
Part 1: Dealing With Your Data
Whether it’s centralized or dispersed, knowing where your data is matters a great deal. If it’s not on a cloud app, do the right people have access to it? Is a spreadsheet being kept by a sales manager useful beyond his team? How is it safe from prowlers? Ask yourself these questions to start.
- Do you know your 10 most important data sources?
Not all data is created equal. Within your business, there’ll be a few data sources — key spreadsheets, business dashboards, sales reports — of vital importance to management decision-making. While Walmart collects 2.5 petabytes of data every hour, it knows not every byte is important. Remote access solutions are a huge help in getting important data sources in front of the people who need them — so make sure you know your top 10.
- Is important data being duplicated or forked?
If people are peeling off spreadsheets, forking datasets, and using stale metrics, it means the business is working with suboptimal information. Work out whether and where it’s happening, because remote access can then show you how to solve it — by connecting devices to one source of data, for a single version of the truth. So see where the forks are in your web of data.
- Is data being siloed by individuals rather than shared?
Many businesses have loads of useful data they don’t even know about: people collecting insights on their own account with their tablets or phones. Remote access lets the right people see that data without changing its format — so foster the idea that sharing data won’t mean extra work.
Part 2: Taking Care Of BYOD
- Do you know how many people bring their own devices?
BYOD is a reality for millions of businesses — over a third of organizations officially allow it. But do you know the breadth and depth of it in your organization? If you don’t know about it, it’s shadow IT, with associated risks. So take at least a straw poll of the landscape: ask how many devices people are using, and the profile of those devices. When you let them connect to data with remote access, it’ll avoid any surprises.
- Can people share data across platforms?
Too much data gets ignored simply because it’s in the wrong format. If that sounds like you, check how many of your key data sources could be usefully shared more broadly. If it’s more than a few, remote access, with its cross-platform approach, is a no-brainer.
- Do you know what apps people are using?
It’s 3 A.M. Do you know where your applications are? If you don’t have a comprehensive audit of precisely what software is in use and what malware might be lurking across your organization, it’s worth finding out. If shadow IT is being expensed or seats are being renewed without reason, remote access monitoring can give you insight to potential savings.
Part 3: Smoothing Out Support
- Is the trouble ticket your only support channel?
Customer service works great, but email threads may be cramping your support technicians’ style. Remote access solutions can open up support with video chats, real-time document sharing, and of course full desktop sharing to show people how to solve problems. With 37% of people now working remotely at least part-time, that’s a lot of ways to keep them connected.
- Are you happy with your support dashboard?
The best support resolution is one the user never knew about. If you don’t use remote access to monitor devices and red-flag potential problems, you probably aren’t getting the best big picture of your organization. See if there are ways you could build yourself the ideal 30,000-foot view.
- Do you need a human around when you update?
Patches, bug fixes, and software upgrades remain a manual process for many IT professionals. And even when they can be done remotely, IT often needs the end user present at their desk to switch the device on. Remote access lets you roll out approved updates even when your employees are asleep, waking up the whitelist and handling updates ready for 9 A.M.
Part 4: Safekeeping With Security
- Do you identify the device as well as the user?
All it takes is one password to be shared and a stranger might be logging on. But if your software identifies the device separately from the user, and matches both against a whitelist — as the best remote access does — your secrets remain safe, since even a compromised login won’t allow a connection.
- Would your encryption impress a bank?
There are still plenty of corporate networks on 64-bit encryption—less than today’s home broadband. The best remote access applications scramble traffic with 256-bit AES algorithms, with keys encrypted at the same levels used by financial institutions. If you’re wondering how many operations a brute force decryption attempt would take, it’s a number with 65 zeroes on the end. Adopt remote desktop solutions across the board and your data will stay safe.
- Are your users onboard with security culture?
Saving the best for last: Within sensible limits, remote access makes it simpler for users to make data security part of their everyday lives. With whitelisted users and devices, two-factor authentication, and fine-grained permissions and policies, your users can become security advocates — beating the worst a chaotic BYOD world can throw at you.
CONCLUSION
Of course, there are countless questions to ask when adopting a new application — but these 12 cover the main areas. And if you answered in the negative to any, a little research now will go a long way towards success later. Why not take a fresh look at what remote access solutions can do?
TAKEOUTS
Before adopting remote access, it’s wise to conduct reality checks.
BYOD users can be security risks — or your biggest security advocates.
Effective remote monitoring solutions enable action, not just red flags.
Before enabling data sharing, make sure you know what data are important.
Look for a multi-layered security model with no single point of failure.
Remote access enables effective use of data you never knew you had.
It’s time to get remote desktop ready. Download TeamViewer today.