Remote workforce — Resource access: Part 2

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

Connecting employees through zero-trust access

To further differentiate and customize the device deployment process (covered in the first part of our series) and ongoing lifecycle management for remote and on-site staff, organizations are turning to modern authentication and security measures.

Through an authentication and identity management solution such as Jamf Connect, organizations can implement a “never trust, always verify” strategy. This is crucial for remote staff who are potentially accessing secure information and resources over unsecure networks.

Jamf Connect and cloud-identity providers — such as Okta and Microsoft Azure Active Directory — offer organizations a high level of user and device trust, while also ensuring a seamless and uninterrupted experience for employees. This is accomplished through three areas:

1. Account provisioning and authentication
2. Identity management
3. User identity and device credential synchronization

Account provisioning and authentication

IT administrators can provision a Mac with all of the business-critical applications needed to be productive based solely on an employee’s cloud-identity credentials. This takes zero-touch deployment one step further as the user can login with a single set of credentials, complete with multifactor authentication, so the organization knows the right person is accessing the right machine and the right resources.

For day-to-day operations, this simple yet secure login experience is leveraged every time a user logs in.

Identity management

Because Jamf Connect requires a cloud-identity username and password, IT administrators are able to monitor what devices are being accessed, from where and by whom. This is a powerful security measure to keep remote employees protected as they may be logging into their device from an unsecure network or if a device is lost or stolen.

IT is able to maintain security and compliance standards across all devices by enforcing password policies via the cloud-identity provider permissions; adding an extra layer of security.

User identity and device credential synchronization

Jamf Connect empowers employees to keep their corporate identity (cloud-based identity) in sync with their local Mac account password at all times. This means employees can access everything they need without having to input a password multiple times.

Gartner reports that 40% of all help desk calls are for password resets. Jamf Connect eliminates these requests, saving IT a substantial amount of time and ensuring employees are not unproductive while the issue gets resolved.

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.