2020 brought a rise in the remote workforce, leaving companies struggling to scale their IT support services.
Many organizations have decided to use a Managed Services Provider (MSP) to help scale their support services and meet their remote team’s needs. Using an MSP has many benefits, including minimizing downtime, improving business continuity, ability to scale, and increase productivity. Also, using an MSP may allow you to monitor and control many aspects of the network from a centralized platform.
Let’s look at how you can use an MSP to scale your services to meet the new reality of a remote workforce.
Infrastructure
Every employee’s environment while working remotely is different. You’ll want an infrastructure that can be flexible yet ensure security at the same time. Your MSP can help assess the gateways to your network to create safe environments for teams to collaborate in. Some key areas to look into are:
Endpoint Devices
Many employees have multiple devices that all operate differently, such as a Windows environment, an iOS environment, or Android.
With the rise in remote work, device security has become more important than ever. If those devices are corporately liable, they must be properly tracked, secured, and updated.
To manage these devices, your MSP can provide identity access management solutions. These solutions ensure that when remote users log on, you have the right identity across multiple endpoint devices with multiple technologies.
Access
Next, let’s look at how people are accessing your organization’s information. If you have employees accessing applications, networks, and data from their own devices, you want to make sure those devices are properly configured.
The configuration could be through mobile device management, proper endpoint security, and access management to ensure interactions from all devices with the corporate network are locked down and secure.
When reviewing your access points, your MSP will look at:
- Who is accessing the information
- What data does this user have permission to access
- What type of devices they will be connecting to the network with
Performance Management
With the move to remote work, there are a lot of new user experiences across devices, platforms, and interactions. You want to ensure that the performance of devices, networks, and applications are optimized to prevent unnecessary frustrations for team members.
Your MSP can track performance and see where you could use additional support to continue to work in real-time. For example, if you’re using interactive tools like WebEx or Microsoft Teams, you might see a spike in volume at certain points of the day and may need to optimize performance.
Infrastructure Security
As your employees access your corporate network off-site, security is top of mind. When your employees were working in the office, you had quite a bit of control over what device they were using on the network.
No matter how your employees are accessing corporate data, apps, or information, it’s critical to have end-to-end security. This means that no matter where the information is located, it is safe and secure.
The move to remote work was unexpected, but it offers an opportunity to assess your current services and infrastructure. As you begin to explore ways to implement an MSP into your IT strategy, ask yourself:
- What would be cost-effective?
- How can I help my teams’ workflow?
- What are the needed long-term solutions for remote work?
Now is the best time to consider an MSP when looking to ensure your entire workforce has secure, safe, easy-to-manage, and real-time solutions, that scale to fit your needs now and in the future.
ATSG—Transforming the customer experience through tech-enabled managed services
Today’s choices for mobility, cloud, infrastructure, communications, applications, and operations are mission-critical for small, mid-sized, and large enterprises.
ATSG, Inc., is leading the transformation into technology solutions as a service with our tech-enabled managed services portfolio and a commitment to technology innovation, operational excellence, and client intimacy.
Recognized by industry leaders and industry-leading publications, ATSG has 25 years of operating history delivering exceptional client experiences that directly result in competitive advantage, cost-savings, growth, and improved operational efficiencies.
Visit ATSG.net, email [email protected], call (914) 517-2919, or visit one of our five tri-state locations today for more information.
