Whether you’re an IT (information technology) professional with decades of experience, a CIO responsible for defining your organization’s digital transformation, or a new college graduate with an IT job at your municipal government, the topic of managing a hybrid workforce has likely been a point of discussion. No matter what IT resources you have at your disposal, your ability to optimize your organization’s remote-access solution is crucial to its success.
A well-designed remote-access solution checks all the boxes of the most important business initiatives, including helping to mitigate risks associated with lost productivity. Below are three design considerations for optimizing your remote-access solution. Keep these in mind not only if you are starting the journey to modernize your workforce, but if your existing solution needs a refresh or even a redo.
- Optimize corporate resource availability – In a modern workplace, your workers may be located across the globe. Connecting a global workforce to corporate resources in a single brick-and-mortar data center leads to lost productivity due to connection lag and, potentially, lack of capacity. Instead, go hybrid and weave cloud resources into your offering. Your remote access solutions can then direct users to the best resources based on their location, change the resource as the user moves, and manage your cloud capacity to ensure resources are always available.
- Optimize application performance – Speaking of end-user connections, ensure you use the appropriate technology to connect remote users to their hosted resource, based on that user’s current task and client device type and on the type of remote resource they are accessing. Mix and match display protocols in your remote-access solution, to ensure power users have the correct level of application performance while minimizing licensing costs for those protocols if users can complete their tasks with a commodity display protocol like RDP. Your remote-access solution should automatically assign the appropriate display protocol to different user groups, without requiring end users to launch different software clients or go to different portals.
- Optimize security – Security is the first and foremost concern of any remote-access solution. That means designing a solution that requires strict multi-factor authentication and enforces stringent access control rules. Those access control rules also must be flexible enough to ensure users can access the resources appropriate for their job as they switch projects or locations. To optimize security, your remote-access solution should leverage the corporate IdPs (identity providers) that users are familiar with for authentication and be able to leverage the attributes provided by those IdPs, in addition to the information about the user’s location, client, etc., to implement the access control rules IT put in place.
You may notice that the different ways you can optimize your remote-access solution are intertwined. For example, optimizing availability using resources in the cloud improves security by limiting remote access to your data center. As with any system, pulling on one string can shorten the other. Consider all the different strings you can pull on as you design your remote-access solution, and where the most important strings (aka, optimizations) are for your organization.
If you do that, you will design a solution that will modernize your workforce now and for years to come.
About the Author
Karen Gondoly is CEO of Leostream, a vendor agnostic platform providing a comprehensive and scalable solution for organizations to securely deliver and manage remote access to physical and virtual machines hosted on-premises and in cloud environments.