IT Remote Monitoring: Powering the Future of Work

There is a long way between where you are now and where you want to be in terms of remote working. However, embracing IT remote monitoring management (RMM) could cover half that distance.

2020 as a year taught businesses two crucial lessons. First, it taught us that remote working is the future of work. Then it showed us how unprepared businesses and IT teams are for that future.

And it shows in the numbers. The rushed adoption of remote working alone led to 137,000 more cyber-attacks. And counting.

If you spent the better part of the start of this decade quickly putting together a work-from-home and remote monitoring strategy, you were not alone.

If You Don't Know Where to Start, Start With Remote Monitoring Management

Remote working has been around for long. For most small businesses, however, this remains uncharted territory and a frontier they will have to conquer

From time immemorial, small business systems have always been in-house, with access given to a handful of people and everything else (even the hardware) kept under lock and key.

That said, the thought of employees walking home with critical systems access (even business computers) is terrifying.

Since recent advances have proven that remote working is here to stay, one question that keeps many small business owners awake is "Where do I start?"

Like everything else, your remote working journey will begin with a single step. That first step is probably going to be small business remote monitoring.

What Is It Remote Monitoring

IT remote monitoring is a security strategy that leverages software to manage your digital assets remotely.

That means having all your remote networks, endpoints, vulnerabilities, and workstations within reach under a single dashboard.

Monitoring systems has always been hard; with the rise of remote working, it will only get harder.

IT remote monitoring will allow your business to track the health and operations of your hardware and software systems remotely.

Well, why is this important?

Apart from the obvious cost savings, remote monitoring will usher you into a new era of remote, scalable, efficient, and productive systems.

And it doesn't stop there. With RMM, working from home and outsourcing will stop being threats to your business and become tools for growth instead.

What Does Your Network Monitoring Strategy Look like Now

To appreciate remote monitoring and management, you have to analyze what your systems monitoring (or lack of) looks like now.

The following quick questions will give you insight into where your digital strategy is and how far you are from the Promised Land.

• Is your preparation for system failures proactive or reactive?
• How susceptible is your network monitoring to human error?
• Does your network monitoring give frequent reports and analytics?
• How often do you ignore or skip system updates and patches?
• Will your network monitoring systems handle a remote working mandate tomorrow?
• Are you confident in the security of your remote working strategy?

What Remote Work Brings To the Table: A Modern Solution to a Modern Problem

Remote monitoring and management won't replace your network monitoring strategy. Quite to the contrary, it will effect it and bring it to life.

The ability for you, or your Managed Service Provider (MSP) through RMM, to manage your systems remotely will enable you to:

1. Patch Management

Managing patches and updates manually can easily become a never-ending nightmare. As a result, most IT teams choose to ignore them and update only when necessary.

The moment these systems become remote, the entire system may risk collapse. Fortunately, RMM provides a timely and much-needed solution.

With IT remote monitoring and management, all your updates and software will be added automatically and remotely. Your job will be to read and analyze the patch reports and attend to any emerging issues.

2. Reporting and Analysis

If you're not getting data and analytics from your remote networks and systems, your business is missing out on crucial information that it could leverage in decision making.

Analytics and reports offer a rare opportunity to look into the health of your systems and identify issues at their earliest.

An RMM not only collects data but also compiles it into reports that can then be analyzed by your UT specialist or your Managed Service Provider (MSP).

3. Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts

Reports and analytics are often long-term. With that in mind, your organization may analyze reports daily, weekly, or monthly.

What happens whenever there is an urgent threat or occurrence?

Enter real-time monitoring and alerts. For a manual in-house system monitoring system, you may have to wait until the next report to identify the issue.

RMM, on the other hand, offers real-time monitoring and alerts. That said, your days of being too little too late: missing urgent issues, threats, or approaching deadlines will soon be over.

4. Proactive Troubleshooting

Finding an issue in one single system is manageable. However, have several systems located in different locations, and it's a different story altogether.

Manual troubleshooting is inefficient and time-consuming. By the time your team discovers the challenge, irreversible damage may already have occurred.

With RMM, however, your systems transition from proactive to reactive troubleshooting. This means that remote monitoring software troubleshoots your systems throughout, whether they are broken or not.

5. Remote Access

Most importantly, an RMM gives your IT team or managed software provider remote access. With the rise of remote working, having remote access for your systems has never been this crucial.

Even without an office, hallways or your employees at the workplace, with RMM, your IT team can still manage your systems.

From one dashboard, you can limit and control the parameters of your systems, including access control, functionalities, updates, and patches.

6. More Efficient Systems Support

A remote monitoring software coupled with a managed service provider will go a long way to making your IT support more efficient.

For example, your RMM could identify an issue through its proactive troubleshooting. It could then send the alert in real-time to your managed service provider, who will then fix that issue remotely.

Alternatively, your RMM could fix the issue independently, or your MSP could send an expert to attend to your systems physically.

By embracing an RMM, you end up having system maintenance that is almost 100% automated with little or no input from your team.

Advantages of Remote Monitoring

The effects of embracing remote monitoring in your organization will be broad and far-reaching.

Beyond a robust remote working strategy, some of the benefits and competitive advantages IT remote monitoring will bring to your organization include:

1. Cost Savings

Manual systems monitoring is not only inefficient but also expensive. The cost of having one manual technician here, and another there, eventually adds up into large amounts.

Even worse, with remote work and outsourcing, having an IT department travelling from system to system will create a big dent in your budget.

With remote monitoring, you get to automate mundane and redundant tasks hence saving on person-hours and eventually trimming your wage bill.

2. Boost Productivity

Most small businesses have an IT team held up in the mundane and repetitive tasks of manually monitoring remote systems.

Not only is this insecure and costly, but also unproductive. One solution is outsourcing the repetitive aspects of your business to remote monitoring software.

This way, you open up your workforce to pursue more productive aspects of your business.

3. Improve Security

Human error is responsible for 95% of all cyber-attacks. Adding remote work to an already inefficient manual network monitoring system is the proverbial "perfect storm" that creates vulnerabilities.

With remote monitoring management, you get to outsource the most redundant, task-laden, and error-prone processes to tried and tested software.

Above that, your systems get an additional layer of security from malware detection including the proactive troubleshooting, repairs, and real-time alerts and notification.

4. Enhance Scalability

One often ignored aspect of remote working, especially for SMEs, is scalability. It's easy for your business to have a robust strategy with ten or twenty employees. However, your business won't be small forever.

What happens when you grow to five hundred? Can your systems handle this pressure?

Remote monitoring management offers a scalable solution for your network monitoring. With remote monitoring, you can always scale up to take advantage of growth and scale down appropriately to save on costs.

5. Take Advantage of Emerging Technologies

The future will be defined by businesses and organizations that embrace emerging technologies, not those that shy from them.

Remote monitoring management exposes your business to a whole range of technologies that will take you to remote work and beyond.

With remote monitoring, your business can benefit from technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), interconnected devices, and ubiquitous communications.

Remotely Build Robust Systems, Save Costs, and Boost Productivity with Level

Realizing the need for RMM in your organization is only but the first step; you still have to find one that meets your needs and delivers on promises.

This said, look no further than Level.

Level is your go-to for unlocking efficiency, saving costs, and securing your systems while at it. Whether you're a small business or an MSP, Level was built with your data security in mind. That's why unlike many other RMMs out there, we leverage peer-to-peer connections to ensure that our servers never access your data.

We can take the hassle out of your network monitoring. For more information, request a demo today, and we will be more than willing to help.