By Jeff Harrell, Vice President of Marketing, Adaptiva
In early 2020, IT teams were getting crushed by the heavy volume of help desk tickets. It didn’t seem possible that the number of tickets could increase further. But then March hit. Suddenly, the entire workforce went remote. This included people who had never worked from home before, people who were learning entirely new ways to do their jobs while managing new life challenges. Needless to say, help desk tickets spiked.
In addition to problems with existing equipment, many employees needed new machines and/or devices to function in their remote environments. Instead of having company-issued, expertly configured machines, employees were opening boxes from Amazon and Best Buy with new systems, trying to figure out everything on their own.
To say that IT teams have been overwhelmed with so many different environments and devices to manage — particularly from their own remote environments — would be an understatement. They can’t just walk down the hall to see what’s going on with a user’s machine; they can’t see what’s happening on someone’s home setup.
Where Problems Lie
The bulk of problems IT teams see today concern endpoints. Machines are missing patches and updates, or group policies have not been configured correctly. Maybe there is insufficient disk space. On the surface, these are not the most complex problems, but they become difficult to remediate from a distance.
Unfortunately, these problems can’t be ignored. In a best-case scenario, delaying a fix would hinder performance. The worst case? Untouched vulnerabilities provide easy access to an attacker, who can then wreak havoc on the corporate network. If this happens, issues become a lot more significant.
Addressing Issues
Automated endpoint management solutions may have gone through early growing pains which caused some IT teams to resist adoption, but over the past year or so, these solutions have matured tremendously. Now they are capable of checking for thousands of endpoint health and vulnerability issues networkwide in a matter of minutes. The best solutions quickly diagnose problems and instantly remediate issues at scale. They can also do it without bandwidth throttling or disrupting business processes, which is pretty incredible when you consider the current strain on VPNs.
Given today’s remote environment and the sheer volume of help desk tickets being generated as well as the increase in security threats (hackers are well aware of the difficulties companies face in addressing vulnerabilities), IT teams need help. Automated endpoint management provides a solution. By offloading and addressing high-volume, basic issues, machines stay secure, workers stay productive, and IT teams stay sane. In addition to getting help desk tickets rapidly under control, team members are freed to focus on bigger, more complex issues — which is good for everyone.
While implementing new software may be the last thing an organization wants to do right now, it might just be their saving grace.
For a deeper dive, check out the webinar replay, “Endpoint Management and Security at Scale in a Remote Work Reality” here.
As first published in Business 2 Community.
