Application Management In A Remote World
What has been your biggest end user support challenge over the past two months?
For some, it may be lack of technology equipment. For others, training requests. But for many: the largest challenge we face as IT administrators is enabling seamless application availability and access.
End user productivity is intrinsically tied to their ability to work with critical applications from collaboration, to payroll and expenses, to database management. In today’s world, applications are directly tied to our ability to keep our businesses running.
How does application availability and management change in the COVID-19 remote workforce environment? In our latest webinar, we discussed short and long-term solutions for ensuring your applications are secure, scalable, and manageable in our current-state. Read on for a recap of this webinar discussion, or click the link to watch.
Five Application Management Considerations
Let’s review the critical considerations for application availability and management. Your understanding of these five key areas relative to application health is critical to their short and long-term availability.
Network
What makes up the underpinnings of remote work? The network. If your enterprise WAN connectivity can’t handle the increased traffic, or if your remote users’ access can’t handle the latency requirements, you will have under-performing applications. Make sure you consider:
Your enterprise network: corporate bandwidth, load balancers, and connectivity for cloud based and on-premise applications and services
Guidelines for remote workers: work-from-home connectivity constraints, bandwidth, and latency.
Security
Where are your data services, and how do you securely access them? Ask yourself:
Do you know the who, what, where, and why of your data access and governance? What about data usage on unknown networks, and new devices that your employees haven’t previously used for work activities?
Can you manage data and device compliance remotely? Including corporate-owned endpoints, patching, and BYOD enrollment.
Do you have a zero trust framework in place? If yes, great; if not, now is an excellent time to leverage zero trust principles to take a comprehensive look at system vulnerabilities. (Check out our guide to the zero trust framework here.)
Do you have a common platform for user identification and authorization?
End User Training
How do we communicate these changes to end users? Providing the technology is only part of the solution. Technology is effective only when end users know how to use the tools. Users are one of the three critical components to Burwood’s security program framework:
Governance: Sets direction and goals
Technology: Supports objectives and enables protection
Users: Educate and empower to access apps and workloads securely
Application Availability
Accessing critical data through applications is essential to continued employee productivity. Consider these key questions to ensure coverage:
What applications are immediately available for remote workers, and can your infrastructure scale to accommodate increased remote usage?
What applications are not available, and how can we close the gap?
How do users need to connect to their applications? (VPN, VDI, SaaS: we go into all these options in the webinar recording. And, check out our previous session on scaling VPN access).
Cultural Change
Prior to today’s current environment, we were unable to proactively mange the cultural change. Our users were thrust into a new normal, whether ready or not. Now, we must rethink all aspects of our thinking and behavior about technology usage and access, including:
Embracing a culture of change and cloud culture
Re-envisioning back office processes and procedures
Rethinking end user engagement tools and strategies
Considering remote work as a long-term option for more users than previously imagined
Long-Term: Create a Application Migration Strategy
Cloud migration enables the clearest path towards long-term application availability, management, and support. When your applications live in the cloud, they can reap the benefits of unlimited flexibility, agility, and scaling.
Application Migration Framework
To get started, Burwood recommends analyzing your applications portfolio to determine ease of migration. Our four-tiered process provides a framework for organizing and prioritizing your application migration plan.
This framework includes key considerations like:
Expense of on-premises vs. cloud operations
Upcoming hardware requirements and cloud alternatives
Business criticality level and user dependencies
Legal and governmental compliance requirements
Custom vs. standard application recommendations
Check out the webinar for a detailed discussion of this programmatic approach.
The Path Ahead for Application Management
For more detailed discussion, we encourage you to view the webinar recording above. And as always, reach out to the Burwood team for additional help with your specific challenges.
April 28, 2020
