Maintaining your IT infrastructure is crucial to ensuring the smooth operation of your business and its growth, but it can be time-consuming and pricey to do so. If your business isn't IT-focused, hiring full-time IT staff can be expensive. This often results in SMEs - small to medium size enterprises - attempting to manage their requirements internally, which may not be beneficial.
Keeping track of expenditure is always important, but small businesses, in particular, need to closely monitor their outgoings. A proactive remote support service will give you the security of constant IT support for a fixed monthly rate without any surprise fees.
Remote technical support ensures basic issues, such as configuration changes, troubleshooting errors, updates and patches, antivirus support, or installation, are resolved fast and efficiently. In the case of remote IT support, your IT service provider can usually resolve your problem within a couple of minutes by phone, e-mail, or chat.
Remote support software can generally be sorted into two categories:
1. Unattended Remote Support
Unattended access means the technician can remotely connect to the endpoint device even without an end-user present. Remote support platforms make this possible by having the IT team deploy an agent app on all the computers they manage.
By having the agent installed on the remote computer, IT technicians are able to remotely access the computers at any time, with or without someone actively using the device. This makes it possible to support computers outside of regular office hours.
2. Attended Remote Support
Also known as on-demand support, or ad-hoc support, attended support allows technicians to access a device the moment the end-user requests assistance. Unlike unattended access, there is no prior setup necessary for attended access.
With an end-user present, the technician can establish a remote connection to their device with their assistance. Various ways can be used to do this, but a common method is to run the remote support application and generate a unique session code, which the user provides to the technician.
As an additional benefit of remote IT support, employers save money associated with on-site visits, have access to multiple IT experts, avoid downtime due to more rapid response times, receive proactive technical assistance and maintain systems more efficiently, and have improved employee satisfaction.