As the nation prepares for the inevitable shutdown, we felt this was a good time to highlight some of the tools that you should be looking at to keep your business functioning as best as possible.

At ATAMA, we have prepared our team for the move to home-based working, ensuring their hardware is functioning, that they have access to various software packages, and that they can communicate freely with colleagues and customers alike.

There are some questions you may be asking yourselves, so we’ve tried to address the main concerns below and give you some guidance on what you need in place:

Microsoft Teams

Is a good web conferencing and collaboration tool that can help support collaboration and remote teamwork. You can get it in the E1, E3 (free for charities), Business Premium and Business Essentials plans.

Remote Desktop / VDI

If you need to cater for an increase in home workers requiring access to corporate resources there are multiple solutions to explore, it makes sense to maximise additional solutions and expand on these as setting up from scratch can take some time. Below are some established vendors who provide good solutions for business;

• Citrix virtual apps and desktop (formerly Xen App & Xen desktop)
• VMware Horizon
• Microsoft remote desktop
• NoMachine (particularly good at supporting MAC/Linux remote access)

Devices

Scale device estate with finance – Invest in more mobile devices to enable anytime/anywhere working using accessible funding outside of capital budget. Short term lease/rental options on new and refurb available.

Remote device management

If you now need to support either organisation owned or staff owned devices, there are lots of solutions on the market. Here are a couple that are worth a look at:

• Intune – You may have this already as part of your Microsoft agreement and it is a great product for managing mobile devices
• Jamf – Arguably the best tool for managing Apple devices and works nicely in conjunction with Intune, great if you have lots of mobile Apple users!

Secure access

2FA/MFA may become a requirement to ensure remote users are authenticated securely and this is a great method in achieving this. There are a lot of solutions in this space, some common ones used in business are:

• Duo offer an easy to deploy solution.
• Microsoft may already be included in your existing licenses agreement

Privileged access is another IT challenge in this area and again you may now need to support remote access but not want them accessing everything!

• Privileged access with Beyond Trust are offering free access to their PAM solution for 90 days. Similarly they are making their remote support product free for 90 days too, see here for more

VPN

If your existing client devices are suitable and have the right application’s/OS etc, and simply need a secure network connection, then a VPN solution may be what’s best for you. Some key considerations for IT:

• Ensure users have good access to a reliable internet network
• We advise setting up a split tunnel VPN – this allows you to choose what traffic goes through the VPN. Ideally you only want traffic coming through VPN that requires access to internal systems/applications, e.g. not Facebook or YouTube
• Pulse Secure (previously Juniper’s JunOS Pulse) are an established vendor in this space and are currently offering expedited and flexible licensing to facilitate rapid deployment, see here for more information