IT Support For Remote Users (Questions/Answers)

More and more of the business world is operating outside the office – whether at home, on the go, or while traveling, remote work is steadily gaining popularity. With so many users outside of the office, what's the best way to ensure their IT services meet their needs?

How Do You Provide The Best Possible IT Support To Remote Users?

More and more of the business world is operating outside the office – whether at home, on the go, or while traveling, remote work is steadily gaining popularity. With so many users outside of the office, what's the best way to ensure their IT services meet their needs?

Does your entire staff work in your office?

Depending on the line of business that you’re in, it’s not likely that they do.

It’s becoming increasingly more common for businesses to hire remote workers – that is, staff members that work from home, outside of the business’ city of operation, and even much further away.

When you picture an office, you likely still tend to think of the ‘90s standard – cubicles, water cooler, etc. But that’s simply not what the modern workplace looks like anymore.

Why would so many businesses be transitioning to this model of workplace? Isn’t it undeniably better to have everyone in one place, under one roof?

Not necessarily.

What Are The Benefits of Remote Work?

Primarily? It’s all about convenience:

• Remote workers don’t have to spend time commuting to and from work each day, the extent of which can often be a deal breaker for potential hires when considering a job.
• Employers don’t have to invest in the space or resources for their entire staff – that means saving money on office space, hardware, break room amenities and more.
• Businesses get access to a skillset and personnel base far outside of what you could call the “commute radius”; whether it’s 30 minutes from the office or two hours, at a certain point you wouldn’t be able to hire someone you’d like to because they live too far away for it to be feasible.

Despite all these benefits, you still might have your doubts – wouldn’t remote workers still add more work to a business’ plate, in terms of getting the data, work resources, and other necessities to the entire staff?

That’s where the cloud comes in.

How Do You Provide The Best Possible IT Support To Remote Users?

We recently had a client ask us about how we provide superior IT support to remote users – our answer?

A comprehensive strategy for cloud services delivery.

The foundation of successful IT support for a given business’ remote workers is based on two fundamental goals:

Ease Of Use

Remote workers need to be able to do their work, and easily.

If they're fighting against unintuitive software, a bad connection, or anything else tech-related, their standard workday won't be all that productive. It won't be long before their employer would simply rather hire a local, in-office worker.

That’s why, so long as the remote worker has a strong Internet connection, the rest of the work is on the IT provider to deliver a responsive and user-friendly cloud platform with which the worker can access their business data.

Uniform Performance
It’s very important that the remote user’s IT works just as well as their counterparts in the office. Any disparity in performance will soon cause delays, and lower the value of those working outside of the office.

In effect, you should be able to think of the combination of the local and remote staff members as all working together in one digital workplace – any disconnect from one to the other is bad for business.

With those two benchmarks in mind, there’s really only one way to achieve it: migrating all necessary work data to a reliable cloud platform. The more data that’s hosted in the cloud, the better it is for the entire business.

There are a number of consumer and business-class solutions available to users depending on the size of their organization:

• Sharepoint
• DropBox
• OneDrive
• Ignite

How Should You Implement Cloud Solutions For Your Remote Staff Members?

You could handle this on your own – if you have the time and expertise, then it’s likely a project you could take care of.

But if not?

Then you need to partner with an IT support provider that can deliver a responsive and reliable cloud solution for your staff – allow On Time Tech to help.

We make the cloud work for you and your remote workers because we know every business has unique needs and requirements when it comes to hosting their systems and data.

Thanks to MSP Marketing coach Stuart Crawford for his contribution to this article...

Like this article? Check out How Can A Managed IT Services Provider Help Internal IT Departments? New Gift Card Scam Hits Just In Time For The Holidays or Important News: Potential Facebook Data Breach to learn more.