Three ways to help minimise the impact of home working

The current lockdown scenario has turned up some interesting and unexpected problems for organisations across the globe, especially in terms of the quality and security of their remote access solutions. For IT departments, it can be difficult to objectively monitor and assess the quality of the solution provided to workers moving en-masse to working from home.

Many organisations have struggled with capacity and user experience issues, not to mention the new challenges of getting critical business applications running over remote access solutions.

When complaints come in, how should the organisation respond to claims of poor performance and limitations on the end user’s experience? How can an organisation quickly identify bottlenecks in function for key business applications? And how can they do all these things and keep the organisation secure?

At AssureAPM, we have developed a three-layer architecture, based on our key technology partners, that allows critical business applications to be exposed to remote users, whether on-premises or in the cloud. This architecture protects critical business application infrastructure, whether your users connect via a traditional VPN, SD-WAN solution or direct to cloud-hosted services.

Securing Critical Applications

The first step is to secure your critical business applications. Often the cloud can look attractive as an easy way of adding capacity to remotely accessed services. The Illumio Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) allows an organisation to quickly define security policies in a way that is not only extremely granular but also very easy to understand.

As the policy is applied at the host or workload level, the Illumio ASP can complement existing perimeter firewalls and/or cloud security services to ensure that workloads within an application are well protected from the outside world and each other.

Utilising the ASP’s unique Illumination Map also allows administrators to understand data flows within the environment, and fine-tune connectivity to, from, and within applications.

Maximising Application Performance

Once your application infrastructure has been secured for remote access, the next step is to set up effective monitoring of core applications to identify bottlenecks and performance impacts. Riverbed’s SteelCentral AppResponse platform gives organisations unprecedented visibility into every aspect of an application’s performance, whether the application is deployed on-premises, in the cloud or within a hybrid environment.

Using AppResponse has a unique capability, administrators can monitor, detect and quickly resolve performance issues throughout the application infrastructure.

Maintaining User Experience

The final piece of the puzzle is to identify and resolve problems with applications from the end user’s perspective. Riverbed’s SteelCentral Aternity product monitors the end user’s experience, giving high-quality insights and telemetry into the user experience. This makes it easy for support teams to identify and resolve problems with application problems as experienced by the user and eliminates the need to replicate issues with key applications. This means that remote workers can be sure that problems affecting their productivity will be quickly and easily resolved.

Tying it All Together

By blending these three highly effective technologies, organisations have more capability than ever to secure, monitor, and resolve issues with critical business applications and infrastructure. By leveraging the granular segmentation capabilities of ASP, along with the visibility provided by the SteelCentral product suite, it’s easier than ever to build, secure and maintain a capable infrastructure to support your business whether your workers are remote or onsite.

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