Remote/Hybrid Workforce
to manage a more complex set of tools and executions than you had before. Tey will have to manage users more effectively across more devices, locations and circumstances, as well as working on areas like trust and management processes. Tis provides great opportunities for partners.
Managing identity in 2023 - who, what and why? To approach this challenge with your customers - and with your own team - there are three simple questions that you have to answer from a technology perspective. Customers have to know who is working for them, what devices they need to work with, and what situations they will be in. For enterprises, there will normally be a directory in place
that is used to manage user accounts. Tis will act as the base for many security, identity and application management projects. However, smaller businesses have been poorly served around user management in the past. Solutions for enterprises are too expensive, so companies typically use email accounts as the ‘source of truth’ for this. Instead, using cloud directory services can fill this gap. Ideally, customers should integrate their identity and IT
management approach with their HR system. Tis can provide the right information on who someone is, their role and what their entitlements are. Using this, you can automatically provision what people need based on their role. Alongside answering who someone is, customers should look
at the devices that someone will use for work. For some, this may be simple - a work laptop and a work phone, for instance - but others will use many more devices to cover office, remote and mobile work use cases. Knowing which devices are authorised means that you can prevent access from other systems, or challenge the user to authenticate themselves thoroughly. Lastly, your customers will need to know why someone is
working in the way that they do. Tis will be what changes the most over the coming months, as users either decide to change their working patterns or conform to new requests from the business. Tis calls for more conditional access policies that can keep up with how your employees work. Tis is also essential to manage when staff might change roles or leave the business, as you no longer necessarily have control over the device that someone might use for work. Instead, you have to manage the identity and what that can access alongside the devices that are authorised to use.
Planning ahead around remote work For companies serving customers around these issues, there are plenty of opportunities to help and support this more complex world of remote work. Te biggest challenges here include getting the right staff in place to run these operations over time and making them profitable for the business. According to Datto’s Global State of the MSP research, 28 percent said they were concerned about profitability, while 24 percent of managed service providers found it hard to find the staff to support customers.
www.pcr-online.biz December/January 2023 | 27 As your customers want more flexible approaches to remote
work, you will have to adapt to this too. If you don’t already use a remote access solution to provide support to your customers’ staff, then you will have to add this to your toolkit. Even if you do have remote support services in place, you can improve your approach - around 55 percent of IT admins say they spend too much on remote access according to our research, and of that, 20 percent say they overspend because it’s an underused tool. Alongside remote access, you can be more efficient by
consolidating your approach around remote support. Tis will help you support customers and their staff wherever they are and build more effective workflows for services. Taking on user identity, device management and security services like patch management provides customers with what they need to run successful remote work programmes. At the same time, consolidating these areas into a unified approach can reduce your costs. Tis can also make it easier to deliver those additional
services that keep remote work secure. A good example of this is multi-factor authentication (MFA) - research by the Cyber Readiness Institute sponsored by Mastercard and Apple showed that more than half (55 percent) of small businesses were not very aware of the value that MFA provides. Only 39 percent of companies are using MFA, despite it being one of the most effective ways to secure users. For MSPs, offering MFA services was previously difficult as
it was hard to justify the costs to customers compared to the expense to deliver the service, when you take common issues like managing tickets and resetting accounts into consideration. Consolidating this and making the workflow easier can deal with these problems, making the service more valuable for customers and keeping it as a profitable one to offer. Whatever happens around remote work, the future will be
more complex. As companies weigh up their options, they will have to ensure that users are secure by evaluating the who, what and why around users, devices and access. Making this simple will keep remote work secure, wherever and however users work.
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