An essential part of any business’s cybersecurity protocol has to be remote access management.

You’re going to feel much safer knowing what’s going on under the hood and on the desktop of your employee’s PC’s.

A remote management and monitoring platform provides you with a security toolbox that will protect your business from vulnerabilities.

Is Remote Management what it sounds like?

Yes, it’s pretty self-explanatory. It involves managing all the computers in your organisation remotely. This can be for individual tasks or involve multiple computers at once.

It’s a little bit like the security guard in a control room sitting in front of hundreds of glowing CCTV screens. Assuming he’s not asleep (like they always are in the films!) it’s his job to notice any untoward behaviour in the building and rectify the problem.

This kind of happens with remote access management but there’s no danger of anyone falling asleep and with automation many issues are fixed with little to no effort. Businesses owners can control the tools themselves or they can get a specialist to do it.

Ultimately, many of the dangers that businesses face come from indifference to the vulnerabilities in their organisation. By not keeping on top of software updates, not fixing bugs and not making sure your staff are playing it safe, you remain vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

Remote management software ensures all this is covered.

Ok but what does it actually do?

Ok, features. Let’s look at some of the cool tools inside remote management and monitoring software.

Patch Management

Arguably the most useful feature of them all. A patch is essentially exactly what it sounds like. If you have a tear in your jeans, you patch it up… right?

Ok, you’d probably just buy a new pair of jeans these days but back in the day that’s what you did. And computers are a tiny bit more expensive to replace than jeans. Just a bit.

When it comes to IT a patch is a bug fix, or a resolution to a failure in your software. Usually these bugs relate to every instance of the software in your organisation.

Now it would take a long time to individually update each piece of software on all of your company PC’s and understandably you’d be tempted to put it off.

The problem with putting these things off is that tears in your IT system, chinks in the armour if you like, are vulnerabilities that will be exploited by hackers sooner rather than later. Soon after a software update is released, hackers will be on the prowl, looking for unpatched systems.

So, to avoid this it is best to patch as soon as an update comes out. The great thing about remote management is that patching is automated. As soon as something becomes available, all of your computers should be covered and updates will begin.

Managed Anti-Virus and Web Protection

Most people are aware of the need for good anti-virus software that ensures every aspect of your system is covered. Most Management platforms will run regular scans to immediately block known threats and run heuristic checks to detect new, unrecognised viruses.

Real time monitoring means that everything is under control at all times. It’s not easy to get that sort of peace of mind.

But web protection goes beyond anti-virus and malware protection. Firewalls and anti-virus software are essential – see our blog post about it – and are pretty good at filtering the good from the bad.

But you may want more control than that. Web protection software offers content-filtering, website blacklists, time and content-based browsing policies, and more. This is primarily for ensuring your workforce is doing what they should be doing and not providing a way in for attacks!

With website blacklists and content-based filters and policies you can ensure your network is secure and is only being used for its intended purpose.

Remote Monitoring and Maintenance

At the centre of any remote management is the general monitoring and maintenance of your system. This can be done by an IT specialist, an engineer in your organisation or parts of it can be fully automated.

Aspects of this monitoring include giving alerts about device performance and health, general performance checks and more in depth investigations.

When working with an IT specialist you will often give control of your PC to them so they can fix an issue or maybe guide you to a specific task they want you to complete.

Having said that, automation is the name of the game. Any maintenance that can be done in the background or out of hours is going to much more beneficial to the company.

Maintenance that doesn’t even need to be scheduled and simply gets underway when necessary is even more appealing. Bulk actions should be able to be done automatically. The technology is there so don’t waste time doing things on your own time.

Don’t get caught out.

So those are some of the main features of any good remote management system. With cyber-attacks an ever present threat and future attacks likely for any business, no matter the size, do you really want to risk not having this in place?

Whether you control it yourself or get someone with the right knowhow to ensure you are monitored and managed at all times, it’s important that you have it.

There are a wide range of integrated features in the Reality Solutions Remote Management and Monitoring platform, including all of the above and more. This system provides a handy dashboard that allows you to view all your computers, servers and infrastructure in real time and you can bolt on extra features whenever you need them and take them off if you want to scale down.

For more information on this and a handy demonstration of how it can work for you, get in touch today!