To say that working practices and the technologies that support them have gone through a major transformation would be an understatement. With remote and hybrid now business as usual, IT help desk and support teams are under pressure to continually secure devices and software, onsite and off—especially with the added problem of limited resources and budgets.
Yet what specific challenges are IT teams facing in this fast-changing environment as remote IT professionals strive to enhance service levels, reduce costs and improve efficiency? What are the principal pain points and barriers holding them back? GoTo, a provider of remote IT support and management technology, gathered 50 senior IT support professionals to share their experiences in a series of roundtable discussions and consolidated all the juicy learnings and insights into the detailed white paper, Five Challenges for Remote IT Support in the Work-from-Anywhere Era.
In this blog, we cover the key takeaways from those discussions. To dig deeper, be sure to download the detailed white paper, which also provides solutions to successfully address all five of these challenges.
Compare your peers’ top challenges to what you face in your organization:
1. Security Concerns
How do IT teams keep pace with new security threats to IT systems, and close security gaps across the tools and devices—not to mention secure remote access software during remote access sessions?
IT leaders spoke out about maintaining high levels of protection for users’ devices and software in the hybrid work environment. One key area of concern is keeping all devices updated with the latest security releases.
2. Resource Consolidation
Switching back and forth between disconnected tools to monitor, manage and provide IT support services is time consuming and reduces the quality of support to end users. Unsurprisingly, consolidating IT tools was high on the priority list of many roundtable participants.
3. Providing Consistent Service Levels
Today, users expect an instant response, whether they’re working in the office or at home. Participants spoke about giving remote workers the same overall experience as those working in the office. To deliver on the high expectations of most users, help desks need easy-access tools that enable them to quickly connect with users, and diagnose and fix their problems promptly.
4. Varying IT Literacy
Poor connectivity, outdated devices and users with little IT knowledge continually prove to be a challenge to IT professionals. Self-service bots may not appeal to some users, while others may tend to shun remote access to their devices, which may be less secure and difficult to maintain remotely. How do you uniformly work with employees, customers or students in a timely and efficient manner? For one, you make remote support as easy as possible for everyone involved.
5. Changing Behaviors
Stop-gap solutions, such as remote support delivered by any means available during the pandemic, have left a legacy of behaviors that can disrupt IT processes today. In fact, what worked yesterday may not work today. For example, collaboration tools used during the lockdown for meetings and IT support may still be in use today, throwing ticket prioritization in disarray and raising security risks. (Here’s more on why repurposing meeting tools is a bad idea.)
Successfully addressing the challenges
All participants agreed that simple, secure and effective IT support is the bottom line. Over the years, that hasn’t changed despite new and pervasive challenges initiated by the pandemic.
GoTo offers two solutions that address these challenges, simplifying IT support in the hybrid environment: LogMeIn Rescue for enterprise and large IT teams supporting more than 1,000 employees or customers and GoTo Resolve for small and midsized businesses.
Download the white paper, Five Challenges for Remote IT Support in the Work-from-Anywhere Era, which offers additional insights into the five challenges, and explores how GoTo applications help mitigate security and other concerns facing IT professionals in today’s hybrid environment.
