Industry Voice: How to securely manage growth in remote working on a fixed budget

clock • 3 min read

A year into the Covid crisis and with remote work still in place and likely to remain in the hybrid office-home flexible working future, IT leaders face an ongoing challenge. While secure remote management has risen from an optional extra to mission critical, budgets haven't grown to the same degree.

When Intel released its vPro platform some 14 years ago, remote work was mostly for the business traveller set. Few could have predicted the sudden demand for secure remote management a global pandemic and near-universal work-from-home orders would bring in 2020.

Today the Intel vPro platform stands as a solution to achieve remote management of a distributed workforce - whilst complying with the inevitable budget constraints - in a secure, adaptable platform.

From securing the boardroom to the bedroom

This year IT leaders have had to rapidly come to grips with managing a distributed workforce as desks were abandoned when employees took flight out of offices. Instead of grabbing an hour of work time on the fast train home, people were turning up to work in their PJs and turning on from home offices, bedrooms and even backyards on a good day.

However, as remote working continues, there is less tolerance for poor access to services and an increase in Cloud adoption - forcing questions about whether current IT infrastructure will be fit for purpose. Looking to the vPro technology suite of hardware and firmware, IT managers can adopt a platform for remote management of a wide range of devices, even when they're powered down or out of band, across organisations of all sizes.

The challenges this year were significant - uncertainty around employee location and the demand to enable wholesale remote working - but IT leaders have met these challenges while keeping the wheels of commerce turning. The next goal is to build capacity to meet the growing demands and expectations. A raft of remote devices require efficient, remote support. The vPro platform has the ability to remotely detect, monitor and repair devices - significantly reducing the costs of IT service calls that don't require on-site support. Minimising downtime from disruptions also improves employee efficiency.

Protecting a suite of distributed devices on a budget

IT managers now face a large, distributed workforce accessing company files and networks from varied locations, meaning end-to-end security has never been more important. The vPro platform wraps together two layers of protection - enhanced hardware-based security features with protection against firmware-level attacks - to provide a robust, secure environment. It is designed for worldwide access and compatibility with the latest operating systems, creating a secure, adaptable platform.

Security patches can be deployed remotely, adding to the significant cost savings of running secure devices though the platform. When necessary, devices can be re-imaged remotely and lifecycle planning and budget allocation is easier to manage in one complete package.

Running Intel vPro platform enabled systems ensures a compatible, reliable class of devices - where the hardware and components are fully integrated with the system and software - creating a stable organisation-wide platform, even where the network boundaries stretch far beyond the office walls.

Managing the new normal of remote workforces

At the start of the pandemic, IT leaders rushed to scale their remote working capability, and did it by all means available. However, one year into the crisis, some IT leaders are now struggling with the set-up they've got sometimes not providing an adequate remote working experience.

It's become increasingly clear that IT managers are facing growing demand to provide a robust remote platform as a standard part of IT infrastructure on a limited budget. Here the Intel vPro platform gives them a solution to meet the growing demand for secure remote management without the corresponding budget inflation.

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