6 critical remote capabilities for the modern service desk

By Karl Lankford, Director – Solutions Engineering, BeyondTrust

IT help desks face an increasingly complex support environment, requiring flexible remote support options that scale, adapt, and continue to meet rigorous security requirements. Whether you’re a small IT business owner or part of a large enterprise organization’s technical support team, choosing the right remote support software is pivotal to the productivity and security of your service desk.

But that is easier said than done. Today, IT professionals seeking remote support software should not only be looking for a solution that helps them troubleshoot technical problems, but also one that bolsters remote access security, is easy-to-use for technicians, enhances the customer experience, and fits into their existing infrastructure.

Broad Platform Support

Modern remote support solutions should enable technicians to provide support regardless of either their platform or the end-user’s platform. When support technicians are on the go, they should be able to seamlessly provide support via their mobile device. Sometimes support technicians need to quickly connect through a web browser, such as Chrome. In these instances, having an HTML 5-based console can be particularly beneficial.

The broader the platform support, the better you will be able to standardize support using a single tool to improve incident handling time, technician productivity, and reap other efficiencies.

Collaboration

Support systems should come with intelligent collaboration features that are central to the customer support experience and help drive faster incident resolution.

These capabilities should include ability to provide chat support, define escalation paths, enable screen sharing and remote camera sharing with live streaming, provide canned scripts, scale management of unattended access, enable troubleshooting beneath the operating system, allow secure access to the command line for troubleshooting, security and auditing, provide access to the remote registry editor on Windows PCs without interrupting the remote customer or requiring screen sharing, allow secure usage on remote networks without requiring VPN tunnelling or firewall changes, create and administer surveys to employees and customers and kill processes and uninstall programs on remote PCs or mobile devices.

Integrations

You’ve already invested in solutions for your service desk or support center to more efficiently track issues and end-user requests. Your remote support software should fit seamlessly into your environment and unlock synergies with the other solutions in your ecosystem.

Remote support solutions that come with out-of-the-box integrations for the leading ITSM, CRM, and systems management solutions reduce administrative burden.

Powerful remote support and ITSM integrations enable organizations to deliver services more efficiently, reduce demand on operations, and manage processes, workflows, and service experiences. For a seamless incident resolution and management process, your technicians should be able to launch a remote support session directly from the support ticket or change record, automatically update tickets with details from the support session, and include the chat transcript and session recording in the ticket. This requires integrating your remote support tools with your incident and case management systems.

The higher the interoperability and the stronger the integrations of remote support with the rest of your service desk, the better the experience for both your service desk people and its customers.

Security, Auditing and Compliance

As remote work has increased, so too has the number of data breaches through point-to-point remote access tools like pcAnywhere, RDP, VNC, and free non-secure access tools. The limited use cases for these tools are frequently stretched beyond what is safe or efficient and their security features (or lack thereof) should be a red flag. Problems with these tools are manifold. The most pressing shortcomings are the dangerous lack of visibility into remote access sessions and the inability to apply the principle of least privilege for access.

Service desk technicians are often required to use admin credentials with elevated privileges to resolve support issues. Although privileged account credentials are a common target for hackers, credential management best practices are commonly sacrificed trying to quickly resolve issues. In fact, many service desk teams share and store credentials in plain text. It’s imperative to provide technicians with the credentials and authentication they need quickly for expedited access to IT systems, while always enforcing credential management best practices.

Today’s threat environment and regulations demand that enterprises be able to identify and record the who, what, where, and when around remote access activities. These are questions only the best enterprise-class remote support tools are purpose-built to answer. Yet, even amongst enterprise tools, there can be substantive differences in security maturity and capability completeness.

Whether you’re subject to PCI, ISO, GDPR, NIST, or other stringent regulations, the right solution should help you easily produce the detailed attestation reports to prove compliance. Security features that support those measures include advanced encryption, least privilege enforcement and granular control of access to sensitive data (such as PII), audit logs, and recordings of all sessions.

Branding and customization

Support customers can be wary about allowing a remote connection to their devices. One important way for support organizations to reinforce positive brand awareness and foster trust is by branding and customizing the support experience for their customers. Ideally, your remote support solution should allow you to create custom portals for each customer, group, and/or product your users support.

Flexible Deployment Options

Seek out a solution that offers the deployment and licensing options that best fit the needs and requirements of your organization. Common deployment options include cloud subscriptions as well as physical and virtual appliances. Some vendors may offer only a single option. Other vendors may offer several options. However, sometimes capabilities and features may vary or be lacking across different deployment scenarios from the same vendor, so verify that the deployment model you choose includes the features and capabilities that you expect.

There are many different remote support use cases, but no matter who or what you are supporting, remote support technology users want a solution that is easy to use, reliable, and secure. The right remote support solution enables users to quickly access and fix nearly any remote device, running on any platform, located anywhere in the world. It should also provide absolute visibility and control over internal and external remote access, secure connectivity to managed assets, and a complete, unimpeachable audit trail for compliance.