Jamf Blog
March 23, 2020 by Daniel Weber

How to empower a remote workforce: Part 3 — Ongoing support

Today, more organizations than ever before are examining their remote employee and work-from-home policies — be it for health, employee retention or employee productivity reasons. In the conclusion of our three-part blog series, we show you how to fully support permanent and temporarily remote employees.

Work has changed. It’s time to adapt.

Today, more organizations than ever before are examining their remote employee and work-from-home policies — be it for health, employee retention or employee productivity reasons.

In our blog series, we explain how you can best serve remote employees and the organization as a whole by:

Part 1: Successfully onboarding remote staff

Part 2: Securely connecting employees to resources — regardless of their location — through zero-trust access

Part 3: Fully supporting permanent and temporarily remote employees

Ongoing support for remote employees

Onboarding (part one) and instant, secure connection to resources (part two) are the first two steps in promoting a productive remote workforce. But, just as important is the ongoing management of the device.

Jamf Pro and Jamf Now communicate with devices through Apple’s Push Notification service (APNs) and tell them how to behave. This maintains a constant connection to devices, so IT doesn’t have to.

When IT wants to modify a device (remote or on-site), they simply send a configuration profile or management command via APNs. VPN, email, Wi-Fi and countless more settings can automatically be applied to an employee’s device — without requiring any interaction from them.

Target devices in bulk

Intelligently target a device or group of devices with Jamf Pro’s patented Smart Groups technology. Leverage smart targeting within Jamf Pro to collect inventory details of all managed devices and then automatically trigger action on the entire group or subset when needed. For instance, if more of your workforce is working remote, you can put them all in a Smart Group and automatically deploy a VPN configuration profile to every device for seamless access to company resources.

Or, make items available on demand to employees via Self Service. IT populates Self Service with approved configurations, resources, scripts for troubleshooting common issues, bookmarks and trusted apps so employees can access and download on their own. Day or night, in all corners of the world, users are empowered all without IT needing to answer a help desk ticket.

Sophisticated app management

The business world runs on apps, so an organization’s management strategy needs to adequately accommodate. Through the integration with Apple Business Manager, Jamf Pro can purchase and deploy apps from the App Store (or your company’s app directory) directly to devices. Again, these apps can be pushed to devices or made available via Self Service.

Deploying the most up to date apps and operating systems (OSs) is also important to the security of the device and organization. Jamf Pro and Jamf Now allow IT to deploy apps and OSs efficiently and monitor the process through inventory reporting.

Even delay operating system availability to give the IT team time to validate the new OSs before making them available to remote end users. This is another way Jamf Pro can help reduce the burden on the IT help desk and empower end users to succeed without needing IT support.

Better Mac protection

As more employees leverage Mac to do their jobs, the need for purpose-built Mac security amplifies. With employees using their computers at home, there’s a whole new risk of attacks against company assets. Employees may become more comfortable visiting websites they may not normally do on a company network, personal email on devices, or trusting their child to play a game on a website. And when that inevitable piece of malware finds its way onto a device, security teams and IT face the additional challenge to remediate that attack remotely.

By leveraging native security tools — like Apple’s new Endpoint Security framework and on-device analysis of macOS system events — Jamf Protect creates customized telemetry and detections that give enterprise security teams unprecedented visibility into their macOS fleet, no matter where the devices are.

With Jamf Protect and Jamf Pro, you have some of the best tools available to identify and remediate incidents on macOS without the devices ever touching the corporate network:

  • Receive real-time alerts of malicious activity
  • Investigate activity on devices
  • Set up proactive blocks for known bad applications
  • Isolate a device from sensitive resources
  • Eradicate malicious files on the device
  • Redeploy macOS and installed applications

Jamf gives you the power to secure your remote macOS endpoints all without impacting the device experience or privacy of the employee.

Empower the modern, mobile workforce

The recent health crisis is only one reason why organizations need to put workflows in place to keep employees safe and productive no matter where they are.

The remote-worker trend will only continue and to maintain a positive company culture, remote employees must be empowered just like their on-site counterparts. Jamf makes this possible, all while delivering the best and most secure employee experience.

Get ahead of the mass-migration to home offices by starting your Jamf trial today. And once a customer, take advantage of over 130 free online training modules on how to best leverage Jamf to empower your workforce.

And be on the lookout for part two of our blog series on how to securely connect employees to resources regardless of their location. In the meantime, sign up for our webinar for additional ways you can support a remote workforce.

Photo of Daniel Weber
Daniel Weber
Jamf
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