Source: https://healthmap.org/covid-19/
As the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak spreads around the world, companies large and small are cancelling non-essential travel and asking employees to work from home. In some cases, they are mandating that employees do so. Of course, the goal is to maintain “business as usual.” For some, remote work IS the usual. But for companies with large populations of office-based employees, the shift to a remote workforce ratchets up the pressure on IT – on systems and the staff. It’s a challenge to provide the same level of service to a remote workforce, even while the IT teams themselves work remotely. How do you make sure your IT team is in good shape to handle the pressure of Coronavirus and a remote workforce? Here are five ways Aternity helps IT teams address this challenge, with visibility into employee experience and insight into the impact of application performance on workforce productivity.
1. Ensure business-critical applications continue to perform, no matter where your users are
With Coronavirus and a remote workforce, IT must ensure excellent performance of all of the business-critical apps on which employees rely, no matter where they work. However, with a remote workforce, IT has less control over the way users connect to the applications and the quality of those connections. Some may use WIFI in their homes, and the quality of service varies. Some may connect via the corporate VPN. Some may not. Just like employees’ health, the performance of your apps may suffer.
Aternity provides visibility into the performance of business-critical apps, as well as the means of access to those apps by the workforce. With Aternity, IT can monitor the end-user experience of every enterprise application, running on any physical, virtual, or mobile device from anywhere they are connected.
Aternity provides visibility into the employee experience of every application and shows the data by department, geography, device type, etc so IT can analyze the performance.
2. Support increased use of collaboration tools
Reducing non-essential travel and conducting meetings virtually instead of in-person doesn’t mean that people will stop communicating. Communication via collaboration tools has sky-rocketed, increasing the pressure on IT to ensure the performance of video and voice conferencing applications, such as Microsoft Skype for Business/Teams, or Office 365, WebEx, Zoom, etc. Aternity provides IT with the ultimate visibility and monitoring for both voice quality and also overall app performance.
Aternity monitors the performance of your unified communications systems, like Teams and Skype for Business Online
3. Resolve end-user issues quickly, remotely, and non-invasively
With Coronavirus and a remote workforce, the work of IT must also shift to be more remote. With an increased volume of remote workers accessing applications via WIFI or VPN, there’s bound to be an increase in the number of calls to the Service Desk. Aternity enables the Service Desk agent to identify the issue without logging in to the user’s device and without the need to ask too many questions. Aternity provides a complete profile of the user, and insight into the recent activity on the device, such as software installations, device health events, and reboots.
The Service Desk dashboard is a one-stop-shop for all of the relevant user and device information necessary to resolve end-user issues quickly.
The Service Desk agent can perform the necessary remediation action remotely, without escalating to higher levels of IT, using Aternity Remediation capabilities. With Aternity’s self-healing capabilities, some common problems can even be resolved automatically, without the employee even calling to the Service Desk. For example, a WIFI failure due to a driver problem can trigger a reinstallation of the driver. Or a VPN failure can initiate a reinstallation of the VPN credentials. Aternity automated remediation thus improves productivity for both IT and end-users, lowers costs, and improves satisfaction.
Track the impact of automated remediation on reducing ticket volume and duration.
4. Protect yourself from the OTHER kinds of viruses – the computer ones
The Coronavirus COVID-19 is not affecting user devices, but other viruses can. With your workforce working remotely, they’re no longer connecting to the corporate network behind firewalls and other security mechanisms. Though humans are safer, outside of the protection of the corporate network, their devices are more exposed to viruses, just those that affect computers.
IT must ensure they’re maintaining the highest security level. With Aternity advanced monitoring capabilities, IT teams can gain visibility into the performance of your security tools and the status of your scans. For example, Aternity can show the status of the Windows Defender scans, how many failed, and why, and whether your security tools are affecting your employees’ productivity.
Aternity monitors the status of your Security tools in protecting against those OTHER viruses.
5. Support remote work by your IT team too
Use Chatbot to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
Your IT team members are human too! Your IT team will most likely also work remotely, but they are expected to continue to support the end-users. With Aternity SaaS, the IT team can log in to the Aternity console from anywhere using two-level authentication, so they can get access to all the data they need to continue to support the business.
Enabling Chatbot solutions integrated with Aternity solution can help provide a faster and easier self-service solution to employees. With Chatbot, wait times are reduced for end-users, and the workload is reduced for IT on routine issues.
Contact AssureAPM for more information or a trial.