For all its benefits, Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) continues to be a massive headache for many enterprise technology teams. From improper personas and sizing, long logon times, hangs, lost sessions, freezes and crashes—often one small mistake in a virtualized environment can set your entire enterprise ablaze.

Inspired by real stories from one Nexthinker’s time spent with 3 different customers, learn from these tales of woe and triumph and learn how Nexthink can help you tackle your next VDI project!

Reader’s note: names and locations are anonymous but the business challenges and solutions therein are 100% real. For more information about these customer stories contact a Nexthinker today!

“Information Overload”

The legal sector is probably the last place you’d expect to find advanced workplace technologies or large-scale digital transformation projects at play.

But Ajad World wasn’t your typical law firm—they had offices in nearly every major market in the world and a complex digital infrastructure that consisted of 60,000 endpoints and multiple VDI environments. Their support costs and digital workplace setup rivaled some of the biggest enterprise technology companies in Silicon Valley.

And the man at the top of Ajad World’s IT Services Department was Marco Dest, the CIO and, as he put it, CWO (Chief Worry Officer). Dest led a truly global team with L1 support members in the Philippines, and L2 and L3 teams spread out across eastern Europe and in Silicon Valley.

Though Dest had personally led successful Virtualization projects in the past for Ajad, he now needed serious help maintaining and responding fast enough to issues in their current setup.

With thousands of remote, mobile, and deskbound users, Dest needed Nexthink to help him put order to their VDI chaos.

Need help managing your post-migration VDI project? Watch how Nexthink makes it look easy.

New Staff, More Problems to Solve

It became apparent from our initial meetings that Dest’s self-proclaimed CWO title wasn’t an exaggeration.

Dest remarked, “It’s the merger. It’s been keeping me up at night. I don’t have a clue how our Citrix, VMware, and Remote Desktop environments are really performing… how am I going to answer those types of questions come January?!”

Aside from the technical demands at Ajad, the 74-year-old law firm was also going through a merger with another law firm. Ajad was to consolidate most of their key legal departments and undergo a major technology transfer—first with the billing and human resources departments, then the rest of the departments to follow. For now, IT Services would remain Dest’s show but with the introduction of 257 new staff, he’d soon have more problems and even less time to solve them.

“

There were even rumblings among Ajad’s employees that IT favored certain departments over others, which of course wasn’t true, but it was something Dest couldn’t explicitly disprove either

A major problem for Dest was understanding what the firm’s various departments really needed from a technology standpoint. Yes, he had ITSM tools specifically for VMware or Citrix but it could take his team weeks to uncover the root causes behind issues like blue screens, hangs, network outages or crashes.

In addition, Dest’s team struggled to allocate the correct amount of resources for each department at Ajad World. The firm consisted of attorneys, accountants, human resources, paralegals, billing professionals, and marketing teams—all of which had distinct computing requirements and support requests. There were even rumblings among Ajad’s employees that IT favored certain departments over others, which of course wasn’t true, but it was something Dest couldn’t explicitly disprove either.

Some employees needed more digital processing power than they were getting, others less.  But without clear insight into the exact Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for all 60,000 employees at Ajad, Dest couldn’t properly diagnose and remediate issues, and he certainly couldn’t defend his team from the rumors that they were playing favorites in the firm.

Taking back the wheel

After sorting out all of Dest’s problems, we started to pick them off one by one. We categorized these issues into the following:

Incident management at scale (device/application/user)

With the merger coming up, Dest’s team needed a quick, comprehensive snapshot of what was going on across his entire digital landscape. With Nexthink’s unique employee-centric platform, we were able to tell him how his enterprise technology was being consumed in real-time.

Using Nexthink’s built-in dashboards, Dest’s team quickly identified unique device, application and user problems that would have taken them weeks to determine in the past:

Devices – Dest now could compare low vs high successful network connections, VDI desktop availability (like bluescreens and hard resets), and drill down into the exact device versions that were causing most of Ajad’s computing issues.

Applications – at the application level, Dest’s team quickly discovered that a particular business communications app contributed to spikes in average network response time even though they were largely under-reported from employees. They also were able to compare key CPU and Memory data statistics in the Nexthink platform, and they quickly isolated a versioning problem that was leading to system crashes across human resources.

Users – similarly, Nexthink’s real-time snapshots into Ajad’s CPU, memory, network response times, successful network connections, logon speed, gave Dest some peace of mind. His team could finally answer questions like how many users caused crashes and who were they?

Comprehensive and detailed vendor comparison

Nexthink also gave Dest’s team the ability to quickly interpret and drill into key vendor-specific performance metrics. In a single dashboard, Dest could compare like-for-like data across Citrix, VMware, and Remote Desktop. Nexthink equipped his team with clear insights into the least used applications in each VDI environment, the average usage intensity, the versions in play, the number of devices, and their OS distribution (i.e. Windows 10 Enterprise vs. Windows 7 Enterprise).

From the same Nexthink overview dashboard, Dest could right-click his way into different perspectives that he never had access to before. He could resolve performance issues with one-click remediations and automations (via Nexthink Engage), compare image performance data, and investigate security issues from Nexthink’s AI-backed alert system.

End user sentiment analysis

Dest and his team used Nexthink Engage to collect key end-user data to address the negative comments and rumors that IT supports certain employees and departments over others. Using contextualized survey questions in the Engage module, Dest was able to leverage Nexthink’s Digital Employee Experience Score (The DEX Score) to understand exactly how users felt about their devices, web browsing, digital security, business applications, and their ability to be productive and collaborate with colleagues.

Combining user sentiment data with key IT metrics finally gave Dest the right information to truly measure Ajad’s DEX. In the past, Dest and his team were practically flying blind. Now, he could quickly see how many employees were unhappy based on their DEX Scores, drill-down into the reasons why, and then quickly remediate those issues via Nexthink playbooks and AI-backed automations.

After just two months of running Nexthink Engage, Dest was able to improve the Ajad employee DEX Score by 0.8 points (from 6.2 to 7.0)!

Maintaining the post VDI migration

Luckily, Nexthink’s out of the box integrations and features made it easy for Dest’s team to not only better manage their unique Citrix, VMware, and Remote Desktop environments, but it also helped them gain greater visibility and cohesion across Ajad’s various L1, L2 and L3 help desks.

The DEX Score served as the proverbial light posts for the Ajad team, helping Dest to benchmark their progress and chart a course towards continuous improvement based on trustworthy, real-time data.

Ajad World recently completed their merger and they’ve acquired some 400 additional employees. Dest remains the company’s CIO and continues to use Nexthink to help manage his VDI landscape. He is also in talks with us now to help migrate to a new SBC environment for one of the firm’s departments.

Dest joked that thanks to Nexthink he’s no longer approaching his project as the “CWO”. Instead he likes to think of himself as the CNPO (Chief No Problem Officer).

Nexthink

These customer stories only represent a few of the many VDI projects we currently service. Though every enterprise technology team is unique they ultimately want greater control, insight, and agility with their digital transformation projects—and that’s exactly what they get with Nexthink.

Have specific questions?

Schedule a demo

Ready to download the VDI solution pack?

Visit the Nexthink solution pack library

The post “Information Overload” – Managing your post-VDI project appeared first on Nexthink.

Nexthink is proud to announce our UI has a new and improved look. We feel confident that this change adds to the philosophy we preach here at Nexthink: to delight people at work.

Aside from the visual improvement, this update also signals a new era for the Nexthink platform.

The first prototype for this new UI was released back in July 2019. Aptly named “Apollo”, we wanted to pay homage to the 50^th anniversary of the first man on the moon.

“It just made sense. We were ambitious and we shot for the moon with this project” proudly explained Patrick Hertzog, Co-Founder and UX Officer at Nexthink.

A practical, sleek look & feel

Taking our appreciation for the employee experience to heart, we wanted to build a UI that IT teams would enjoy using, something that would make them more productive and engaged in their work.

Our brilliant engineers were able to turn this dream into reality, and we couldn’t be more excited for our customers.

“

We want to improve the product’s user experience and deliver something more delightful, a high-quality digital experience.

To that end, a new visual language was developed to give users a contemporary and intuitive look and feel. Indeed, beyond a refreshed typeface, color scheme and button layout, a lot of thought was put into more practical and vibrant dashboards. For instance, Apollo’s polished grid structure organizes information in a more digestible manner and adapts to different screen sizes or usage scenarios. In addition, the layout is more accessible for users with varying visual needs, such as color-blindness or for those that require low-luminosity workspaces.

Style backed by power

Apollo is more than just a “new coat of paint”. It’s an intricate design system that, from a back-end perspective, is driven by some seriously powerful tech.

“

Apollo is much more than just a new design. What we’ve put in place will truly accelerate the development of new features.

Of course, Nexthink always has been—and always will be—powered by high-tech. But Apollo offers customers a sleek product cover that warrants the same amount of detail and creativity that went into the technology that sits beneath it.

A new era

Ultimately, with this new look, Nexthink will be able to better streamline and optimize the release of new ideas and product features and empower users to more confidently manage their companies’ digital experience.

“

You know, Apollo wasn’t really developed to keep the Nexthink spirit, but rather to define it for the future.

Interested in seeing Nexthink in action?

Book a demo now

The post Nexthink’s Platform Gets a Facelift appeared first on Nexthink.

I often smirk when I hear or read about other companies pitching a digital experience management platform for IT support.

To outsiders this claim may sound innocuous but after 30 years in IT I know most cannot even come close to understanding, let alone managing, the full Digital Employee Experience (DEX).

Why?

It’s best to define some terms before I draw any lines in the sand.

When other tech companies say they’ll improve your “digital experience” they really mean “digital performance management”, which can take the form of Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and other back-end monitoring solutions—all of which are certainly valuable for enterprise IT—that much I agree with 100%.

But those companies fall short because they disregard (and simply cannot measure) their employees’ perspectives. They try to solve the puzzle of DEX with only half the pieces available and that is why they fail.

Why should IT care about employee sentiment? Money, Money, Money

If businesses could thrive without having to worry about employee satisfaction, or if networks, devices, and business applications communicated in some sort of parallel universe devoid of human interaction, then yes—I’d say things like employee sentiment and end-user monitoring are useless.

But that’s not the world we live in.

Companies simply cannot turn a profit without an engaged, stable workforce. And it follows that the networks, devices and business apps that IT provisions to their employees can keep people engaged and productive at work, and ultimately help a company grow.

It’s also been proven that the overall employee experience—this sense of personal-independence and engagement on the job—directly boosts the bottom line. Companies that prioritize their employee experience over those that don’t produce twice as much revenue and over four times the profit margins.

Conversely, businesses with poor technology environments tend to have a higher employee turnover rate, and because of this, they waste millions trying to recover their losses. For example, workers at companies in poor-technology environments are 450% more likely to change jobs compared to just 2% at tech-friendly companies. For some roles, especially in tech, employee turnover can cost a company up to 2.5 times their employee’s salary.

If, for example, the bulk of your employee salaries range from $60 – $120k, it only takes a couple of employees leaving to inflict millions in “brain drain” company costs. In addition, there are other “soft” costs that can take a toll like lowered productivity, decreased engagement, training costs and the cultural impact.

But what if I’m already spending well on Digital Experience?

Most IT departments believe their existing budget and strategy is preventing the type of turnover costs outlined above.

The problem, however, is not if but where they spend their money and time.

Companies continue to invest heavily in network resources and backend server capabilities. Backend capabilities include servers, storage, software investments (i.e. not network elements) found in data center(s), and cloud-based services—all of which are still relevant and vitally important to IT support.

However, many companies make significant financial investments in software monitoring tools based on flawed reasoning. The expectation is that these monitoring tools will enable IT to better support their employees, but how can this be if they have limited visibility into what their employees experience and zero capability of intervening in a non-disruptive manner?

NPM, APM, and other backend monitoring tools report performance and availability information for the network and they sometimes provide a few utilization metrics such as “trending on application usage” by employees.  Unfortunately, metrics like those fail to answer critical employee-perspective questions like: why do certain employees react better to tech deployments than others? Or, how do my employees rate their digital experiences today versus last month, and why?

Beware: most companies in digital experience management are just selling you another monitoring tool that gathers “hard” IT metrics but ignores your employee’s feedback.

It’s tough combining timely and powerful employee computing insights with metrics from your network, servers, and business applications. But you need both sides of the coin, preferably in one platform, to best understand what is happening across your digital workplace.

I’ve seen many IT solutions in market these past 30 years, and all except for Nexthink have had this glaring Achilles heel when it comes to DEX.

From the data center to your employees, we got IT covered.

Want to see how we do it?

Book a demo or reach out to me today!

The post The Achilles Heel – Why Our Competitors Fall Short appeared first on Nexthink.

The shift to remote work has taken place almost overnight for many companies, creating enormous challenges for both IT and employees.  There are no months of planning, pilot rollouts, or performance stress tests.  IT teams are being asked to implement massive changes on a daily basis, despite being vastly overworked and under-appreciated, all while maintaining focus and professionalism.

A key challenge for IT leaders now is managing the remote working experience.  Communication, collaboration, and support processes that worked well in the office must be re-engineered on the fly.  Monitoring tools built for the corporate network may not apply.  And deskside support must be replaced by something virtual, automated, and scalable.

At Nexthink, we are committed to helping IT teams manage this change effectively and supporting them to the best of our ability.  Today we are sharing a new library pack for remote work and an overview of remote work use cases and capabilities.

New library pack for remote work

In addition to the extensive capabilities already included in the Nexthink platform for remote working, we are pleased to announce a new library pack specifically for Remote Worker Experience.  Built with record speed by our product team, it extends our existing platform capabilities with pre-built content for some of the most common remote work needs.  Like all library packs, Remote Worker Experience is included with the Nexthink platform at no additional cost.

1) Remote working checklist dashboard

This dashboard allows IT teams to better understand their organization’s current preparedness for remote working.  It provides key information about the readiness of collaboration tools, VPN, firewall compliance, and other factors in a single view.  For example, you can review your VPN certificates and ensure VPN clients are properly deployed.  You can also identify non-compliant configurations and send remote actions (using pre-built scripts) to employee devices to enforce security and compliance standards.

2) Remote worker experience monitoring dashboard

This provides the visibility, insight, and automation needed to deliver a great experience once employees have made the shift to remote.  The library pack offers a detailed overview of the digital experience of both remote and in-office workers, with insight into employees’ collaboration and network performance.  For example, you can view the Digital Experience Scores of remote vs. office-based employees, to quickly identify potential issues and drill down for further detail.  You can also monitor the performance of collaboration tools and network response times, instantly troubleshoot issues, and proactively prompt employees with potential fixes.

Compare the digital experience of remote workers vs. office-based workers over time and drill down to identify any issues affecting the remote experience

3) Remote worker satisfaction dashboard

This allows you to collect targeted feedback from remote employees about their digital experience.  It complements the technical metrics gathered from apps, networks, and other resources, ensuring that any disruptions to remote worker productivity are quickly surfaced, whether the employee takes the time to contact IT or not.  For example, you can use targeted engagement campaigns to ask specific employee groups if they need help with any digital resources, based on observed resource usage or technical issues.

The Remote Worker Experience library pack is available immediately.  Over the coming weeks, we will continue to publish additional remote actions and library packs to help customers best support their remote workers.

Remote work use cases for managing the digital employee experience

For those looking to further leverage Nexthink to deliver a great remote experience, we want to highlight some additional use cases that customers are using Nexthink for today:

Ensuring Microsoft Teams adoption and performance – You can use the existing MS Teams library packs (Migration, Adoption, Health, Advanced health) to support effective internal collaboration, by monitoring, identifying, and resolving any issues that occur.

Monitor adoption of Microsoft Teams across the organization, with the ability to measure how the collaboration score improves for remote teams before and after deployment

Monitoring network performance – Assessing digital experience by tracking event data at the device, app, and network levels, you can accurately pinpoint any issues that occur, whether on the server side or the employee’s home network, so that problems can be quickly addressed.

Identifying disruptions to individual employees – Using the Digital Experience Score as a guide, you can easily see if any remote workers are having a poor experience due to device, web, collaboration, business app, security, or employee satisfaction issues – and immediately perform the best remediation steps, many of which can be automated.

Managing “Shadow IT” – You can use Nexthink to identify and remediate non-compliant software and related issues, in order to prevent employees from using software that causes policy compliance violations, security risks, or application incompatibilities.

Managing VPN capacity – By tracking and reporting on the number of VPN certificates in use, Nexthink can help you better plan for and manage your VPN capacity.

Enhancing the remote experience with Nexthink Engage and Nexthink Act

Key to enabling these remote working use cases are Nexthink Engage and Nexthink Act.  Together, they enable you to deeply engage with and support your employees so you can give them the best possible remote experience.

Nexthink Engage allows both IT and HR to communicate proactively with employees in real-time, no matter where they are.  Keep employees informed and engaged by:

• Gathering employee feedback and sentiment. By asking targeted questions of specific groups, such as remote workers in a particular country, you’re able to keep a finger on the pulse of those groups and immediately discover any technical disruptions, organizational concerns, or other issues.  If feedback reveals problems, you can drill down into detailed event data to understand the root cause, how many employees are affected, and the optimal remediation actions.  For example, you can monitor employee sentiment of those who have been asked to use new collaboration tools in a country where everyone previously collaborated face to face.
• Broadcasting critical communications in real-time. Get important communications to your employees instantly, via a friendly and convenient communication channel.  Use it for simple reminders, important company announcements, or anything else.  Easily tailor communications based on location, role, or technology usage, such as Windows vs. Mac users.
• Proposing targeted suggestions to improve the remote experience. Based on user behavior, you can provide targeted tips to help employees be more productive working from home.  For instance, you can automatically identify if the employee’s network is slow and propose suggestions such as changing the wireless access point location.

Automatically engage employees to help improve their remote experience, based on visibility into which employees are having connectivity issues

Nexthink Act complements Nexthink Engage and Nexthink Analytics by enabling proactive troubleshooting and problem management:

• Assisted Service. Support agents and operations teams can remediate problems quickly by pinpointing an issue across the entire employee base, assess the impact, and take actions with one-click during a troubleshooting session.  Act can also be used to identify the employee’s geo-location and enable location-based support.
• Self-Help. You can identify and bring issues to the attention of employees as soon as they are detected, and guide employees to take remediation action.  For example, Act can check the employee’s VPN setup and ensure they are ready for VPN-based remote work (or identify what to do if they’re not).  In concert with Engage, Act can also identify if an employee’s wifi connectivity is weak and proactively provide suggestions on how to improve it.
• Self-Healing. You can also use Act to ensure the desired state of computing is continuously maintained by automating and resolving problems in real-time, without employee impact.  For instance, it can uninstall non-compliant software as appropriate.

With the new Remote Worker Experience library pack in addition to all the Nexthink capabilities you already rely on, you now have even more power to fully understand and manage the remote experience of your employees.  We look forward to continuing to serve your needs, no matter how quickly they evolve.

For more information, please download our new Remote Working use case overview.

The post Powering the Digital Employee Experience for Remote Workers appeared first on Nexthink.

The past several weeks have been anything but normal, especially for those in enterprise IT.

Though every company is facing their own unique challenges, we have noticed that certain technical use cases come up over and over again with our customers.

After two months, and hundreds of use cases, we’ve picked the top remote work problems that enterprise IT departments are solving with Nexthink.

1. Device encryption done at scale

Many IT departments unfamiliar with remote work are struggling to quickly encrypt their devices at scale. Device encryption is the one safeguard IT can use to protect their employee devices in case of physical theft—but getting to this final stage can be challenging for tech support and disruptive for remote workers.

The problem right now is that in order to successfully encrypt a remote device, IT asks too much of their end users: employees have to initiate certain sessions and actions just to activate their encryption software, they then have to pass through multiple reboots that take time out of their workday.

Aside from the general disruption this causes, employees get no assurances either—they won’t get answers to like:

Will I be able to work once the encryption process has started?

Do I need to stay connected to my device while the encryption is in progress or can I leave?

Once my hard drive is fully encrypted, will I get a confirmation?

For IT, they have to deploy significant time and support staff to guide employees through this multi-step process—all while simultaneously performing complicated backend work, like cross-checking technical security protocols in their registry and WMI tables.

“

In just a few days, we deployed more encrypted laptops than in the last 5 years.

Attacking this problem at both ends, Nexthink has been helping IT support to encrypt their devices at scale with the help of powerful remote actions and pop-ups that guide employees in record time. For example, a national defense organization recently used Nexthink’s Act & Engage modules to encrypt 15,000 remote devices in just 3 days, and without a single remote worker having to ask IT for help.

2. Effective IT comms & employee feedback

IT communications and outreach has never been more important than now. Whether it’s communicating to remote workers on how to connect to their VPN, offering advice to improve a weak Wi-Fi signal, or sharing pertinent COVID-related news, IT is being asked to do it all but they don’t have the right tools to do the job.

Unfortunately, tech support relies too heavily on email and popular messaging apps to communicate with remote workers. The former (email), is notoriously ineffective for 3 reasons:

• Messages can end up in a spam folder
• Targeting by email address doesn’t always account for every employee (for example, contractors)
• Not every person actively checks their email (or has it open).

And popular messaging tools are equally as ineffective because they can succumb to certificate expirations or bugs, and not all employees may use them.

Some IT support teams are circumventing these limitations by using Nexthink’s Engage module.

They can set either one-off or perpetual campaigns to target exact user groups with helpful pop-ups that are impossible to ignore. With 80% response rates, IT departments can collect critical insights from employees in single, multi, and opinion-based answer formats. And this sentiment data isn’t only relevant to IT, HR can also leverage this information to better understand how employees are coping with their current workload and remote setup.

3. VPN health & business continuity

Most businesses use a VPN (or multiple VPNs) as a means to sustain their company’s productivity and protect their data, devices, and remote employees.

For IT, monitoring the company’s VPN can be an enormous undertaking: they have to constantly check that tools don’t exceed the network’s limit; discern if certain power-heavy apps need to be rerouted to their proxies; identify any connectivity issues, hard resets, and a host of other variables. If IT cannot deliver the appropriate response to problems in real-time, the VPN can crash and knock any and all employees on it offline.

Thanks to Nexthink’s comprehensive dashboards, tech support is able to track in real-time all devices, users, binaries, ports, and destinations within their VPN setup.

Sometimes customers even use Nexthink’s insights to isolate employees that don’t need to be connected to the VPN in the first place.

For example, one customer last month experienced a spike in traffic nearly 5x their average because users assumed they needed the VPN to access every single one of their intranet applications—but a third of those workers only needed Office365, a suite of tools that could’ve been easily accessed outside the network!

4. Version control

One of the most widespread challenges IT encounters with remote work is version control.

Knowing which software applications are current and which are soon to expire can save businesses from downtime and productivity loss.

For example, if an employee uses Skype as their principal communication tool but their certificate expires, they will be thrown off the application and unable to collaborate with colleagues.

Drill-down into your collaboration tools & ensure they are always up to date.

It’s also important for IT to know which devices and business applications are set for upgrades, and which might be vulnerable to security breaches (think Windows 10, for example).

A few weeks ago, one IT department used Nexthink’s dashboards to quickly isolate employee subgroups that hadn’t updated particular business applications for things like SharePoint, Office365, and Slack. Within the same Nexthink platform, IT was able to update those users with the most recent application versions, which ensured their colleagues stayed productive and protected.

5. Offsite Multi-Factor Authentications

Many remote workers have also been forced to pass through new multi-factor authentications that have invariably tripped them up.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a common IT process where an end user must successfully pass two or more pieces of evidence (or factors) to an authentication mechanism—like a pin number or security code sent to your cell phone or personal email address.

Normally, when a worker is onsite, they don’t have to worry about passing through an MFA because the company’s local network runs the authentication check automatically.

But for remote workers this can be different.

To circumvent this problem, IT departments are using Nexthink to send targeted campaigns that guide remote workers on their own accord. For example, a few weeks ago, employees at a large packaging company phoned into the IT help line en masse, looking for assistance with their MFA process so they could connect to the VPN. The average wait time per worker lasted over 15 minutes.

“

We're really excited about how we were able to turn around this MFA project, we've never been able to do something like this before in such a short period of time.

Within 24 hours, IT sent out a targeted Nexthink campaign that detailed how users could quickly complete the MFA process. After 3 days, over 300 remote employees successfully activated their MFA and connected to the VPN without contacting IT for help.

6. Deeper incident data to show the full story

Popular ITSM tools like Splunk, ServiceNow, and even data mining software like Power BI, are very useful for IT from a systems-centric standpoint.

However, tools like those only reveal half the story. None of them can show IT support the real-time information from their employees’ digital experiences nor the critical performance data going on in their devices and applications.

Yet, if you merge Nexthink’s extensive data tables with those tools, IT can operate on another level.

For example, our customers are taking advantage of key data fields like Nexthink’s last local IP address and the Digital Experience Score to pin-point the exact location of their remote workers and corroborate this information with key performance data from tools like Power BI, Splunk and ServiceNow.

IT can work faster & smarter with our integrations in ServiceNow and other popular ITSM tools

With simple integrations, one-click resolutions and out-of-the-box remote actions, Nexthink makes it easy for IT to act more proactively and fix issues across their entire digital architecture.

7. Safeguarding against Shadow IT

The jump to remote work has thrown millions of employees onto popular collaboration tools like Zoom, Skype, MS Teams, Webex, and others. Call and video quality, certificate expirations, application updates—there are countless tasks that IT has to handle for their remote workers but they have limited resources and time to do it.

Unfortunately, working from home makes it easier for employees to access collaboration tools that sit outside their corporate IT policy. Most IT departments can’t fully monitor and protect their endpoints in a remote environment and this leaves employees vulnerable to cyber attacks and performance degradation.

But thanks to Nexthink’s collector technology, our customers can avoid these situations.

With the collector, IT support has the visibility to determine which software and devices should and shouldn’t be used by employees. For example, one manufacturing customer discovered that 10% of their remote employees were using shadow IT tools to schedule meetings and share important financial documents. Using Nexthink’s messaging features, IT was able to target those exact users and push them onto the correct collaboration tool (MS Teams) in less than an hour.

Preparing for the new normal

This list is just a snapshot of the type of use cases that tech support teams are solving with Nexthink.

For many businesses, remote working is causing significant damage to their bottom line and the well-being of their employees. Nobody knows when things will return back to “normal” but our customers are prepared to support their remote workers for as long as it takes.

If your IT department needs help solving critical remote technology problems, contact Nexthink today.

Interested in seeing our Remote Working pack in action?

Watch Demo

The post 7 Remote Work Problems IT is Solving With Nexthink appeared first on Nexthink.

With millions of employees recently making the jump to remote work, some IT departments are finding themselves on unfamiliar ground, and with newfound stress and pressure.

The stakes seem higher now. IT cannot visit an employee’s desk or stop them in the hallway whenever they encounter an issue, they now have to solve problems proactively and remotely.

But for some companies, the switch to remote work has been smooth and painless.

Those businesses are led by IT departments that understand the importance of seeing problems through the eyes of their employees. They have the tools that can let them drill-down into the smallest of details and pull back to see the bigger picture

Of their many technical tricks, one has to do with something we call last local IP—a critical data field that helps IT better identify and support their remote workers, regardless of where they work from.

I can’t help you because I can’t see you

One problem many IT departments are now realizing is that they cannot accurately locate their remote workers.

Most tech teams can’t identify where their employees are located

This can pose a problem for IT if certain web-based apps like Salesforce, Teams, Zoom, and other tools experience issues because of say, network outages or cyber attacks that occur in specific geographic locations. Think of the local IP address like your full home address—without knowing where you truly reside, it becomes virtually impossible for IT to determine if regional IT problems affect you or not.

And right now, IT can only see your router’s address—so that’s like the equivalent of sending mail by post but only listing the recipient’s country and omitting the rest of their contact information.

So what’s holding IT back?

Since most businesses are in the cloud, this means that the last IP address for a remote employee working, say in their company’s VPN, will only appear as an external internet address.

For IT this means they can only make a binary decision, which is inherently limiting: if the employee is on the VPN, their device would be assigned an IP from a list of ranges, and if they’re not in the VPN they’d get assigned from a different set of ranges—neither of which show the worker’s true in-network IP address.

Local vs Source IP address

In previous versions, the Nexthink Engines would read the IP address (or addresses) of a device from the header of the IP packets that they receive from the Collector.

Indeed, a field called Source IP Address is part of the header of every IP packet. So, for Engines that share the same network as their monitored devices, reading the IP addresses of devices from the header of the received IP packets makes perfect sense.

But when these tools try to monitor devices in a different network, the routers between the two networks perform what is known as network address translation (NAT) to IP packets in transit, effectively changing the original source IP address on each packet to the IP address of the router in the source network—this change, though minor, limits IT’s capacity during incident investigations to go the extra step and fully determine an end user’s geographic location.

So we decided to break through this limitation.

See what your local network sees, before the NAT process

Fortunately, several IT departments are using Nexthink to push beyond their router’s IP address and adding the IP addresses for their remote employee devices as seen from the local network before those packets are modified by NAT routers.

For example, in the chart below employee devices 192.0.2.10, 192.0.2.12, and 192.0.2.11 would traditionally all register as 203.0.11.113.1 for IT support, but Nexthink pushes beyond the router and passes those internal IP addresses (and their unique digital experience insights) straight back to its engine.

Identify the local IP address of your onsite and offsite workers

And what about multiple local IP addresses?

Of course, a single device can have multiple network adapters, each one with a different IP address assigned in the local network. For instance, a laptop may simultaneously have a wired Ethernet connection and a wireless connection to the local network.

In those instances, the Nexthink Collector reports the IP address of the adapter that is used to communicate with the Engine as the Last Local IP address.

Solving real remote work problems for IT

Many IT departments that use Nexthink are starting to realize the added power they have at their fingertips now that most, if not all, of their employees are working remotely.

For example, one IT department within a fortune 500 professional services firm, is using the Last Local IP field (in addition to the rest of the Nexthink platform) to identify 375,000 remote workers and help them avoid disruptions like Skype certificate expirations and track critical digital experience metrics from their company’s web browsing, security, productivity and collaboration tools, business applications, devices, and employee sentiment.

IT can now work more proactively and get ahead of issues with complete insight into their endpoints, regardless of where those workers are located.

Interested in seeing how our remote work library pack works?

Watch Demo

Have questions?

Contact Us

The post Your Last Local IP Address, Giving Context to IT’s Remote Worker Data appeared first on Nexthink.

Missed our webinar on remote work digital experience? Watch the recording here.

It’s no secret that many IT departments are scrambling to support hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of new remote workers.

Last week over 700 IT Operations leaders and professionals registered for our Remote Work digital experience webinar because right now these people are facing unprecedented pressure to keep their companies productive and their employees free of technology disruptions.

The feeling from many on our webinar was that their company’s IT experience is taking a hit, but it doesn’t need to be this way.

With Nexthink, many organizations are able to maintain the same great digital experience that they had when their employees were in the office.

These are the key components that sit at the heart of every great remote work environment, and what it can mean for your business.

Remote work readiness

Whether you are moving employees to remote work for the first time or reshuffling your existing setup, it’s important you have the right visibility into your infrastructure and users.

To do this you need to know:

• The ongoing readiness status of your different device types, whether virtualized or not
• If collaboration tools, firewalls, and user accounts are correctly installed and stable
• If certificates are installed and valid for services like VPN and for work tools like Office 365
• If security and compliance standards are established and being followed

Using the right readiness assessment capabilities can show IT whether their devices, collaboration tools, firewalls, VPN, and certificates are ready or not—and provide drill-down views by location, VPN, OS, and firewall type.

This level of detail allows IT to proactively manage their remote workers’ experience without having to rely on ineffective communication channels like email or phone lines.

Manage remote work experience

For IT operations, sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of a technology problem or specific digital transformation project.

But you shouldn’t lose sight of your company’s overall Digital Employee Experience, nor the specific experiences for elements like web browsing; productivity & collaboration work; security compliance; critical business applications and device performance.

To see both the big picture and its finer details, leading organizations are benefiting from a 360˚experience score that combines the factors mentioned above and pulls in timely employee sentiment data.

IT can use a comprehensive Digital Experience Score to prompt incident investigations and add more context from the employee’s perspective for traffic spikes, network latency, manual reboots, Teams or Zoom crashes, and a host of other performance issues.

Experience scoring can give IT the context to determine where problems truly reside, become more proactive in managing experience, and measure progress over time—a known truth to guide teams in a sea of continuous tech challenges and changes.

Manage services critical to your remote working 

An effectively managed remote work environment also means that IT can quickly view and respond to issues with their services that are critical to remote working.

Remote workers simply cannot do their jobs if their technology services falter. In order to prevent performance degradation, IT needs to have visibility into important metrics like traffic volume (incoming & outgoing); network response time; and the number of failed connections.

Real-time dashboards that house this type of information can help IT become more agile—they can quickly identify bottlenecks say, in their VPN traffic, and immediately drill-down into certain office locations and end user groups.

When you have the most critical information all in the same place, your team can be more proactive with incident investigations and remediation actions for remote users.

Engage with your remote employees

Taking IT’s role one step further, there is plenty you can do to ensure employees stay productive and engaged—they just need the right tools to do it.

Without employee feedback, IT has no idea how their services are being perceived.

But let’s face it: traditional IT communications don’t work. Email can get lost in spam folders and has a low response rate—and other comms channels (for example, MS Teams, Slack, or Yammer) are only effective if users actually check them.

Many organizations have found the best way to collect rich sentiment data is to send friendly, targeted messages to the employee’s screen.

IT departments that use Nexthink Engage see what their employees like and dislike about remote work, and they can corroborate this sentiment data with more technical performance data to gain deeper insights and make better decisions.

Meet your remote work needs today

Even if it might feel like your company’s tech problems are unique, I assure you we have seen them before.

Currently, we are helping countless enterprise IT teams unlock insights into their remote work environments that they never knew were even possible.

Don’t let your technology stack limit what you are capable of fixing.

Right now, nobody knows how much longer we’ll be working from home, so why not equip your company with the best digital experience possible and come out stronger for it?

If you’d like to leverage Nexthink’s remote work solutions, contact us today.

Richard Matthews, Director of Solutions Consulting at Nexthink

David Gressle, Director of Professional Services at Nexthink

The post What 700+ IT Operations Pros Learned about Improving the Remote Work Digital Experience appeared first on Nexthink.

Right now, millions of people are working remotely for the first time, and they’re doing so on company laptops and mobile devices.

And with millions of these devices now offsite, this throws but one more wrinkle in tech support’s security plans—in addition to worrying about insecure networks and malware attacks, IT must also safeguard against physical theft.

Yes, device encryption is the logical fail-safe for such a scenario and a must-have for any remote IT setup. Yet, being able to encrypt devices at scale—and with limited disruption to employees—isn’t so easy, especially for organizations that have stringent security protocols and employees that are unaccustomed to working offsite.

We set out to change this problem for our customers.

In particular, last month a European security agency, who asked to remain anonymous, used Nexthink to help guide their employees through a complicated and disruptive multi-step encryption process in record time.

In this article, I will show how this particular customer did it, and how Nexthink can speed up the device encryption process and help any organization become more secure, productive, and flexible during these times of uncertainty.

But first:

Why is encryption such a pain for IT anyway?

Message encryption is as old as antiquity and it still forms the backdrop for basic computing today.

Back then, ciphers (encryption algorithms) were used to unlock hidden messages from a limited range of letter and key combinations. People could decode encrypted messages within a reasonable amount of time and attempts.

Fast forward to today and advanced computing has made it virtually impossible for thieves to crack into the raw data that is encoded on most computers and passes over the internet. A 256-bit encryption key—the standard for protecting most hardware and software—all but guarantees your data will remain safe and undecipherable if of course, your encryption software is properly executed.

Though encryption keys are full proof, enterprise tech teams encounter problems when they have to enable their encryption software.

Here’s what I mean.

Most digital encryption projects (individual file and folder encryption, volume encryption, or full-disk encryption) will inevitably require some input from end users. At a minimum, employees will need to define a single strong password but that might not be all they’ll have to do.

More often than not, IT will ask employees multiple times to assist with encrypting their own device.

There is plenty of powerful, built-in encryption software in market that can quickly secure a company’s work devices—Apple FileVault for Mac, BitLocker for Windows and even third party tools (like Veracrypt for Linux) can get the job done.

But in order for these programs to run, end users might have to manually reboot, trigger certain sessions and authorize new passwords—sometimes several times over.

In addition, tech support might even force a reboot on an employee device to help push the process along regardless of where that person is in their workday or what they are working on.

But why would IT ever do this?

In such a scenario, a forced reboot might be the least bad option available.

Many times the encryption software that IT runs has a “grace period” (i.e. 14 days) for users to finish their respective steps—failure to do so might mean the software could automatically disconnect an employee and continuously force a restart on their device—I saw this happen once to an end user where every 10 minutes his laptop would automatically restart!

Another possible messy scenario: any remote employee whose disk is not fully encrypted, might have to return to the office or ship their device back to IT to resolve the process or extend the user’s grace period.

Aside from these disruptions, employees rarely receive assurances either.

During the standard encryption project, end users won’t be able to answer questions like:

Will I be able to work once the encryption process has started?

Do I need to stay connected to my device while the encryption is in progress or can I leave?

Once my hard drive is fully encrypted, will I get a confirmation?

The reason being is that most* IT departments lack the type of communication and automation capabilities to effectively target employees by geography, work device, software type, and their unique digital experience.

It’s true that most* teams lack this hybrid functionality, but not all.

Acting swiftly and intelligently for 15,000 devices

Several of our customers have been using Nexthink’s Act & Engage modules to help speed up their encryption projects and ensure their endpoints are properly secured.

Last month, a European security agency accomplished this very task. With the country soon to enter lockdown, their IT department needed to transfer 15,000 employees and their devices offsite in just 3 days.

“

"In a few days we deployed more encrypted laptops than in the last 5 years"

Their IT department had SCCM to help deploy and update their dormant encryption software, but they needed a plan first to guide employees through their multi-step encryption process.

In particular, the agency’s employees would have to: reboot their device, open a session with their profile so the dormant encryption software could activate, then after a few minutes reboot a second time, and finally define their unique encryption password.

Without Nexthink, their alternatives to enable this process were unhelpful to say the least:

• force a reboot on 15,000 work devices, which would most surely disrupt workers and tamper with their critical national security projects; or
• ask employees to trigger the first required reboot and hope they’d be able to figure out the rest of the process without giving up and phoning into the L1 help line.

Attacking the problem at both ends, the IT team used Nexthink to initiate powerful remote actions (Act) and send targeted messages (Engage) to employees to guide them through the process in record time.

By the third day, all 15,000 workers transferred offsite with fully encrypted laptops and without a single employee having to call into the IT department for help!

Endpoint protection at home or in the office

Like many of our customers, this particular IT department is using Nexthink’s critical services dashboards to now monitor their employees’ remote devices and ensure they continue to have the latest certificates for their VPN and collaboration tools, and that their firewalls, malware and user accounts are correctly installed and stable.

Planning for an eventual return to the office, the agency’s IT team will be using Nexthink to conduct a full scan of their employees’ devices to ensure they have the latest antivirus protection and are safe enough to connect back to their internal network.

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding remote work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Remote Working: Encrypt 15k Devices in 3 Days? No problem. appeared first on Nexthink.

The phrase just a few months ago has never seemed to cover more ground than it does today.

Well, just a few months ago, Nexthink commissioned a study with Vanson Bourne to find out the real state of the Digital Employee Experience.

Vanson Bourne reached out to 3,000 IT leaders and employees across major markets in the USA, United Kingdom, Germany and France. We were so excited to share the results because they offer a fresh and unique perspective into the world of technology and the employee experience in today’s workplace.

Then, of course, the pandemic hit.

However, while we are launching The Experience 2020 Report into a much-changed world, we know that, for those IT teams managing the millions of newly made remote workers, its insight into real users’ experiences will be especially valuable.

Here is a shortlist of unique findings from the 2020 Experience Report:

• $25 million in costs – technology issues in 2020 are costing a 10,000-person business up to $25 million on average
• 50 hours in downtime – IT interruptions have employees waiting up to 50 hours each year for help
• 82% want more to be done – most employees would like to see more done by companies with respect to their Digital Employee Experience
• 61% think tech downtime is accepted norm – more than half of respondents agree that IT downtime is an accepted norm in their organizations
• IT’s visibility is around 50% – tech teams only have approximately 56% visibility into the success of new technology deployments; 58% visibility into the adoption of those deployments; and 45% visibility into the issues impacting employees’ experiences

Get the facts you need to stay ahead of your IT challenges and business competitors.

Read the 2020 Experience Report today.

The post $25 Million Lost: Tech Issues Hit Businesses Where It Hurts appeared first on Nexthink.

Close your eyes for a moment and think of the least tech-savvy person in your family.

Ok, open them.

This person, even with their limited tech skills, probably understands that the farther you stray from your Wi-Fi router, the worse your connection will be.

Incredibly, Chris and I can count between us over a dozen customers whose IT support teams failed to consider this one factor.

How could something so simple fly under the radar of enterprise IT?

3 reasons:

• L1 support might be able to monitor your Wi-Fi strength but they can’t easily combine this information with other network performance statistics and they certainly cannot use this information to isolate anomalies or draw meaningful correlations
• IT cannot effectively target and communicate with remote employee subgroups or confirm their messages are being understood
• Tech support cannot measure how something, like Wi-Fi strength, impacts their company’s overall digital work experience.

To be fair to them, IT isn’t to blame—they can only do so much with the limited tools they have at their disposal.

Fortunately, several support teams are using Nexthink to identify how their employees’ home Wi-Fi affects their critical collaboration tools. These customers are then using our targeted messaging module (Engage) to quickly reconcile performance issues and to understand how those efforts impact their Digital Employee Experience.

Your Wi-Fi signal is but one piece of the puzzle  

In late March, a global car manufacturing company asked us to solve their technology issues with Teams and Skype.

The company’s remote employees complained of dropped calls, poor video and audio quality, and a general slowness with these two applications.

Like many do in IT support, their team fell for a common trap: they were preoccupied with the speed of their network and less concerned with its quality. Video conferencing applications are sensitive to the quality of a network—and signal interference, for example, can cause data send errors that will decelerate a network’s speed. The stronger the signal, the less effect noise from other devices (mobile phones, microwaves, ipads, etc.) can have on a Teams or Skype call.

Working only off ticket data reported into L1 support, IT Ops assumed that roughly 1.3% of their remote workforce (260 people) were experiencing issues.

We’d soon show them how wrong those numbers were, but we first pointed their call center to Nexthink’s built-in L1 checklists.

From a single pane, the L1 team was able to view a composite overview of their remote architecture that showed real-time network performance metrics, key Wi-Fi information, and digital experience scores categorized by Skype, Teams, and remote employee profile.

This level of detail allowed their IT analysts to quickly infer that a person with a Wi-Fi signal below 60% its full strength experienced worse connectivity and network response times than their colleagues with stronger home office signals.

Taking their investigation a step further, IT found that this subgroup reported a drop in their overall Digital Employee Experience by as much as 5 percentage points (from 7.0 to 6.6) during the same time period.

With little else changing in their remote environment that week, the team felt confident they had isolated the main culprit behind their Skype and Teams woes.

You said 1.3% of employees were affected? Guess again.

Thanks to Nexthink’s endpoint monitoring capabilities, the customer’s IT Ops team discovered their original numbers were way off.

Looking beyond just ticket data, the team found that roughly 3,000 employees (15% of their entire remote workforce) suffered the same type of Teams and Skype connectivity issues.

It was obvious then that many people failed to report their problems.

Acting on this information, they next used our Engage module to send targeted campaigns directly to those affected employees, offering clear, on-screen messages that asked them to move closer to their router.

A week later, IT reported that all 3,000 employees had improved their Wi-Fi strength above the previous 60% threshold, that their Teams and Skype performance was stable, and their Digital Employee Experience scores were ticking upward once again.

Do you want to solve your remote work problems quickly and at scale?

Many IT departments that use Nexthink are starting to realize the added power they have at their fingertips now that most, if not all, of their employees are working remotely.

IT can work more proactively and get ahead of issues when they have complete insight into their devices and end users, regardless of where those people are located.

Learn how we can help. Contact us today!

The post How’s Your Wi-Fi Signal? IT’s Remote Work Blind Spot appeared first on Nexthink.

Most remote employees are probably familiar with a security practice known as multi-factor authentication (MFA), even if they cannot technically define it.

If you’ve ever tried to complete an online purchase and were met with a string of security questions or received a one-time password (OTP) on your mobile device—then you’ve participated in an MFA process.

In its simplest form, MFA is an additional security layer that forces end users to pass through at least two of three parameters: something you know (e.g. a password), something you have (e.g. an OTP token on a mobile device), and something you are (i.e. biometric data).

Much like disk encryption or antivirus software, MFA is but one more weapon used by IT Ops to safeguard against cyberattacks and data theft.

And yet, aside from its popularity and utility, many companies are realizing that deploying an MFA project can be incredibly confusing and disruptive for both employees and IT support.

Ready. Set. Wait!

Here’s what I mean:

This spring, one of our customers deployed an MFA solution for their remote work environment and immediately ran into trouble.

Looking to add a supplementary security layer to their VPN setup, IT Ops deployed a new MFA solution on their company’s first remote workday. The idea was that employees would log into their devices with their passwords (something they know), then to connect to the VPN, they’d answer a few challenge questions (something they know, x2) and receive an OTP token on their mobile device (something they have).

But by noon that day, the IT help desk received over 300 calls from employees looking for assistance.

And we’ve seen similar situations occur with other enterprise technology teams.

So why does this sort of thing happen?

A few reasons:

• Not all employees are comfortable or savvy enough to immediately complete an MFA request
• Without advanced warning, employees can feel blindsided by the MFA process and will instinctively reach out for help or confirmation
• Not all security factors have clear and concise language, and some can seem suspicious (imagine working from home for the first time and being asked to pass challenge questions when you are accustomed to SSO)
• Some MFA solutions may prompt users to question why they can’t see which security questions they answer are correct or incorrect (there’s a good reason for this)
• IT cannot proactively support employees during this process because they lack effective targeting and communication tools, and as a result, they often get slammed with tickets post-deployment.

How to bridge the gap

There’s one thing our customers have that helps them cut through the noise:

Clarity.

They have clarity on how their end users perceive their digital experience, and they can effectively guide these people during remote MFA deployments and do so at scale.

“

We are really excited about how quickly we were able to turn this (MFA deployment) around. From panic to calm in just a few hours!

That same customer who received over 300 calls into their help desk, quickly pivoted and used Nexthink’s Engage module to turn their situation around.

Leveraging our patented technology, the IT Ops team was able to target those users that hadn’t passed their MFA clearance by providing clear, on-screen instructions to successfully guide them through their steps. Each region’s employees received the same instructions, under the same company logo, but written in their preferred work language—French, Spanish, or English. Engage offered the right mix of scalability and efficiency for the IT Ops team who could immediately track in real-time how well their message was being received.

After just two days, the company’s entire remote workforce passed their MFA clearance without having to open a single IT ticket. In the end, Nexthink saved the IT help desk from 50 hours of phone calls and troubleshooting.

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding remote work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have Questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post 300 Tickets & Counting: Clearing Up Confusion Over Multi-Factor Authentication appeared first on Nexthink.

The recent shift to remote work has been anything but subtle for millions of people and their companies. And like many in IT Ops, our customers have been preoccupied with maintaining an error-free VPN experience.

But that’s often easier said than done.

Luckily for them, VPN issues that would normally take weeks to resolve are being turned around in minutes with Nexthink’s patented technology.

Regardless of their industry, company size or technology stack, our customers experience the same “aha” moment with the Nexthink platform—they can see their once hidden problems in plain sight and they’re able to quickly resolve those issues at scale and across any remote employee device.

What’s the “aha” moment for IT Ops?

Before partnering with Nexthink, our customers used to make the same mistake: they would assume that if no tickets were raised from end users then their VPN environment and Digital Employee Experience must be stable and strong.

“

This was like finding a needle in a haystack for them. They couldn’t believe it.

Yet, after using the Nexthink platform they would see that their previous assumptions were wrong.

Nexthink’s real-time digital experience dashboards and dynamically generated, end-to-end network mapping can show any connection made (warning, error, etc.) on any employee device. This insight enables IT Ops to see how software updates, patches, firewalls and other executables impact relevant VPN metrics like response time, traffic, failed connections, bit rate and more. This level of detail and simplicity is game-changing for enterprise IT.

Get a dynamic look across the devices, users, ports, binaries, and destinations in your VPN

For example, the IT support team at one of our Fortune 500 customers recently cracked a VPN problem in record time that would have been impossible to do with another tool.

One morning, their VPN’s network response time spiked from an average of 1s to 10s, so IT used our platform to trace the symptom (network response time) back to a single cause—a faulty outlook plug-in. In a few clicks, they were able to see the entire story: one plug-in error occurred on 8 devices which linked to 9 specific ports and 5 exchange servers within their VPN environment.

Tracing the VPN’s slow network response time back to specific remote devices, end users, ports and destinations, gave IT a level of insight and clarity that would have been impossible to replicate with another tool. Nick Morea, Nexthink’s Senior Solution Consultant told us that this customer’s IT Ops team were thrilled they could use this type of information to break down siloes within their own department. For example, their L1 support analysts didn’t have to wait on the network team for this data, they could instantly diagnose the problem right then and there.

In addition to this unique drill-down capability, our customers are using the platform to compare and trouble-shoot their employees’ VPN experiences with their in-office and internet-based employees.

Compare the Digital Experience of remote workers & office workers (or internet-based workers)

With a real-time window into how their different employees experience web browsing, business applications, and a host of other metrics, IT support is able to quickly investigate drops in performance and chart progress made on any intervention.

Drill down and compare critical application and device data between remote and onsite workers

Of course, after discovery comes action, and this is where Nexthink really kicks into gear.

Acting swiftly and smartly

Once our customers understand what’s really going on in their VPN environment, they next use our platform to quickly resolve their problems at scale. Since Nexthink can track any execution made on an employee device, it can also trigger hundreds of remote actions across any endpoint.

For example, one customer recently experienced a spike in VPN traffic nearly 5x their average network usage. The company’s remote workers assumed they needed to connect to the VPN to access their intranet applications—but a third of those workers only needed Office 365, a suite of tools that could’ve been easily accessed outside the network!

To resolve this problem, IT used Nexthink to target those exact people that were taxing the company VPN by sending helpful on-screen messages urging them to disconnect.

The ability to identify and target users at scale would have been impossible to replicate with another tool. But with Nexthink’s simple user-interface, IT Ops can quickly build one-time or recurring remediation scripts like we did for this customer or they can set system, investigation, or service-based alerts to warn their teammates of any performance drop across their IT infrastructure.

In addition, Nexthink’s seamless integration into common 3rd party self-service portals and ticketing systems like ServiceNow, makes it easy for our customers to programmatically trigger these remote actions via their API of choice.

IT can set a number of automated fixes across key objects, activities and events

Or set alerts and remote actions based on a customized schedule

Equip your IT team with a tool that can deliver ‘aha’ moments & get the job done

Remote working isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. In fact, we think for many companies this will be a permanent change. The faster that IT support can fix their VPN problems, the better off their employees will be working from home.

Those “aha” moments for our customers are great, but what really drives change is Nexthink’s ability to rectify and proactively fix those problems.

That’s better than “aha”, that’s game-changing.

Naveen Kumar, Technical Services Manager

Sidharth Ranka, Senior Technical Consultant

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding remote work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have Questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Remote Working: VPN Problems? Discovering IT’s ‘Aha’ Moment appeared first on Nexthink.

There has been a lot of talk about transforming employees’ digital experiences, but what does this really mean, and how can it be achieved?

This is what Nexthink and its partner Fujitsu are solving each and every day.

Balancing subjective employee expectations in the face of objective corporate challenges

Employee experience refers to the evaluation that employees make regarding their work environment. That is, every factor that enables them to work calmly and productively, from their company’s management style to the physical location of their offices and, most notably, the performance of their digital tools.

In fact, digital work tools have the greatest impact on employee performance. Research has shown that a majority of employees believe that the poor performance of their digital services and applications has a negative impact on their productivity.

“

People just want to consume their digital resources at work as easily as they do in their personal life.

In the modern workplace, you often find two opposing views: those of the employees and those of the company.

On the one hand, employees have a subjective perception of their digital experience within the company, which they evaluate in relation to their personal experiences outside of work. They seek the flexibility to use their mobile devices for work and to work remotely.

Employees want to be productive without wasting time on tasks that do not bring added value to the company, like troubleshooting frustrating device issues. People just want to consume their digital resources at work as easily as they do in their personal life.

On the other hand, faced with these expectations, companies still have to manage their objective missions and business challenges. There is the need to meet the expectations of customers and shareholders, ensure a sound transformation of the company’s business model, a constant desire to retain top talent and prevent any negative social and environmental impact.

The gap that exists between employee and employer can create a serious risk of misalignment between both parties’ expectations. Ultimately, this can lead to employee disengagement and disillusionment which can quickly escalate into a wide range of negative impacts on vital aspects of the business, such as workforce productivity or brand reputation.

Yet, this employee-employer juxtaposition represents a tremendous opportunity for CIOs to align the user experience with the company’s performance.

Myth: satisfying your employees goes against improving company performance

Adopting an approach to improve the user experience will only increase a company’s productivity. There are four courses of action business leaders should take to achieve this goal:

Your IT department should focus first on the value it provides to employees.

This involves measuring employee satisfaction linked to the consumption of all IT services: hardware (network, application access time, etc.), support, access to knowledge, mobility and self-help.

While companies often know how to provide high quality service to customers, IT should also be able to do the same with their own employees. The support department should no longer be a reactive “factory” for dealing with problems. Instead, it should become a proactive help desk, pushing ahead of problems and helping people to understand and adopt with their new digital tools and services.

IT needs to understand that the impact their applications and services have on the Customer Experience (CX), is equally as important with impacting the Employee Experience (EX). This means employees must be included in IT’s strategy by providing sentiment feedback on their digital experiences.

You should aim for operational excellence in IT services.

In other words, IT must provide a robust foundation of operational services that allow infrastructures, networks and workstations to function perfectly.

You should steer IT services according to the Digital Employee Experience (DEX).

This involves adding factual data to IT performance measurements, which capture employee satisfaction by integrating employees’ perceptions and feelings.

You should focus on encouraging employees to adopt this new approach.

To this end, it is necessary to present the added value of these changes, namely obtaining a better understanding of employee needs, prioritizing projects, and regularly measuring their satisfaction in real time.

Where can you start?

We recognize that no two transformation projects are alike and that any action plan must be implemented pragmatically. But a proper EX strategy should establish a system that makes it possible to know the current health status of a company’s IT landscape, and be able to correlate those findings with their employees’ perceptions of their digital work environment.

The goal of any digital transformation project needs to be agile so as to carry out rapid and positive change on both the company and its employees. It is therefore up to IT to spur this positive change and help meet their employees’ expectations by offering sound technology advancements and employee support.

Bruno Pinon, Digital Workplace Advisor, Fujitsu

Olivier Gilder, Channel Manager Southern Europe, Nexthink

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding digital work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have Questions? Contact Us

The post Take It From Fujitsu: Digital Employee Experience Is Everything appeared first on Nexthink.

I have good, bad, and good news for you.

Let’s start with the first good news:

After three months of uncertainty, several countries are starting to reopen their economies and plan their way out of the pandemic. It appears there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel.

Following the same drumbeat, many business leaders right now (with the help of their IT & HR teams) are trying to assess the well-being of their remote workers and determine which of them can safely return to the office this summer.

The bad news?

For many, progress has been painfully slow because they lack both the technical reach and contextual tact to properly gauge their employees’ work experiences and earn their unique feedback.

And the second good news?

Luckily, several companies are using Nexthink’s patented technology right now to overcome these exact challenges and safely bring their remote workers back to the office.

Reclaiming a sense of normalcy

For example, one of our customers, a leading multinational gas company, is systemically cycling their remote workers back onsite thanks to our platform’s advanced targeting capabilities and digital experience scoring system.

Each week this company makes their employees complete COVID-19 health declaration forms to vet their well-being and availability to come onsite. After the employees complete their forms and are deemed fit, IT Ops sends them each a building access code and assigns them to one of three teams (red, blue, or yellow), with each team then allowed access to the building for a week at a time on a rotating basis.

“

We needed a way to cut right across to our employees and get them to respond. This tool helped us do just that and track feedback all in one spot.

The company’s current strategy is to slowly phase all workers back into the office based on a combination of their local city’s COVID guidelines, their employees’ health declaration data and their digital experience (this last point is especially key, as explained at the end of this article).

But as many executive leaders are now realizing, just getting to a point where you can safely reopen is no easy task.

Why the “traditional” doesn’t work

In order to build a practical post-COVID strategy, you need reliable employee feedback and outreach.

Unfortunately, most IT & HR teams that are leading this effort are using ineffective, traditional tools like cell phones and email communications.

That approach will always be an uphill battle.

Phone calls or text messages sent to employees can easily be ignored, mistaken for spam, or interpreted as a breach in privacy. Honestly, what person wants their company’s IT or HR department periodically contacting them on their personal cell phone?

My guess is not many.

“

We tried collecting declaration forms using email campaigns but the results were abysmal.

And email campaigns are equally as ineffective. Targeting is limited by the email exchange server, so any employee without an official address (e.g. sub-contractors) might be inadvertently excluded from a campaign. Also, emails can easily land in a spam folder and at best, average only 30-40% response rates.

In fact, before using our platform the IT Ops team at that multinational gas company sent an email campaign to their employees hoping to collect those COVID-19 health declaration forms, but the campaign failed miserably, receiving an open rate of just 22% and a response rate of 12%.

Hyper-focused targeting and powerful end user computing data

Turning to Nexthink’s platform, this customer’s IT Ops were able to quickly build a customized on-screen message with a url to the company’s declaration form.

With the message drafted, IT then quickly scaled their campaign across the company’s 4,257 devices. Two days later, 97% of the company’s employees responded and completed their declaration forms.

An example of a Nexthink campaign our customer sent to their remote workers

The success of the campaign came down to several factors:

• Nexthink’s on-screen messages are difficult to ignore. IT can set them to expire after several seconds or enable them to close only after the end user answers them.
• It’s easy to track the progress of a Nexthink campaign and see in real time how many users open and close these messages. This customer kept their messages active until the time the employee clicked “complete” on their declaration form.
• Targeting is flexible and scalable – IT Ops set an alert in the platform to automatically send the same campaign the next day to those remaining 3% of employees that didn’t complete their forms.

How IT can help forge a plan back to the office

Before offices can safely reopen, business executives need actionable data that they can pilot.

Collecting those health declaration forms was a solid first start, but our customer wanted to take their plan a step further. IT and HR teamed up to corroborate their employees’ declaration data with their digital employee experience scores.

Looking across six critical metrics, these scores showed a window into how their employees both perceived and experienced their current remote digital work environments.

The results were enlightening to say the least.

The team found that some of the company’s employees were happier and more productive working from home while others were the complete opposite.

In fact, our platform showed that roughly 30% of all company employees complained of a poor remote work experience for factors beyond IT’s control (for reasons like family distractions or uncomfortable work stations); and of this subgroup, every employee had declared themselves healthy and safe from COVID exposure.

Knowing that this subgroup was both eager and healthy enough to return to work, the two departments gave the company’s executive leaders a plausible plan to pilot the reopening of their office.

This is just one example of how our customers are using Nexthink to build a bridge back from their remote work environment.

If you’re looking for IT solutions that can help bring your remote workers onsite, contact us today.

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Back to Work, How IT Can Reopen The Office appeared first on Nexthink.

The catchphrase “shadow IT” has always been a bit misleading in the world of tech support.

Is using Dropbox instead of Google Drive akin to committing some seedy act in a dark alleyway? Jokes aside, it seems tech support’s real problem has less to do with terminology and more to do with the way they approach shadow IT.

Their aim is often near-sighted because their tools hold them back. Most IT departments leverage asset management tools that can identify what applications and services run on a corporate system—a critical outcome, no doubt—but they cannot answer why employees choose certain apps over others.

And answering the why  helps prevent companies from wasting millions on underutilized cloud services and shadow IT purchases made outside their enterprise IT shared services budgets.

Check out the Nexthink platform in action

Only seeing half the story isn’t good enough

There are plenty of asset management tools that can answer “what” applications your employees download and “how” they use them. For example, a strong asset tool can pinpoint SaaS subscriptions that perhaps were once popular at your company but are now underutilized, and IT can then use that knowledge to cancel those subscriptions and cut costs.

That’s an excellent short-term win. But what if those same users stopped using that SaaS tool not because they didn’t like it but because they couldn’t figure how to upgrade to a newer version?

Or imagine this: what if IT continued to upgrade a particular business tool that they deemed “essential” to the company’s technology stack, but in reality, was wildly unpopular among employees?

The problem with asset management tools is that they only tell half of the story that’s going on in a company’s digital environment.

“

We discovered over 1/3 of employees were using shadow IT tools, and we had no idea why so many struggled with MS Teams.

These tools cannot reveal whether staff need different applications to complete their work, or whether employees lack the training to properly use their existing apps, or whether the poor performance of a Zoom call is due to the application itself or that user’s home Wi-Fi router.

Simple asset discovery and usage tools could save money up front, but they could also cost businesses more over the long term—if IT simply cancels subscriptions without factoring end user experience data, they could be forcing their workers to use tools they hate, and productivity will inevitably fade.

There’s a conflict at play here that these tools cannot quell. Employees naturally gravitate towards any non-approved app or service that can make their work lives easier. Yet, IT cannot just stand idly by—they too have an interest in safeguarding users from malware, viruses, and a whole host of computing issues that typically emanate from non-approved tools.

But perhaps there is a way to bridge the interests of both parties—a way that can give IT complete visibility over their employees’ computing experiences and the ability to quickly automate fixes at scale. And for end users, there has to be a convenient way to share feedback on what tools they prefer and how they perceive their digital work environment.

How to find what works best for your employees

Using the Nexthink platform, our customers are bridging these two competing interests. Their IT support teams use Nexthink to analyze what tools (approved or non-approved) sit on their employees’ devices, and how those users experience their respective digital work environments (taken specifically from our onscreen employee feedback campaigns and comprehensive digital experience scoring dashboards).

An example of a digital experience dashboard (by device)

An example of one of our shadow IT dashboards

The data collected in our platform, equips IT with the ability to educate their employees (onsite or offsite) about their tools, when to connect or disconnect from their VPN, and how to complete an array of other end user tasks. In many cases, IT has used our platform to help shake up their tech stack and replace certain apps with tools that were once in the “shadows”.

Here’s what I mean:

One of our customers, a large North American manufacturing company, recently used our platform to discover that 35% of their remote workforce was actively using non-approved collaboration tools to hold meetings and share work documents.

At the time, their IT department had only recommended the use of MS Teams, but with Nexthink’s patented technology they discovered that employees across various departments were using a mix of Skype, Zoom, & WebEx—tools that were purchased outside their shared services budget.

Not only was this practice counterproductive for communication, but the use of Skype, Zoom and WebEx—three non-approved applications—left the company vulnerable to cyberattack and caused disruptive digital experiences for their workers. Hundreds of tickets were raised by employees, complaining of blurry video calls, slow connection times and device lags. And from IT’s perspective, both their L1 and L2 support lines were seeing erratic traffic spikes in their VPN and bandwidth issues that couldn’t be pinned down.

Who’s to blame?

The issue wasn’t that Skype, Zoom and Webex were inferior tools—our platform later revealed that each registered fast connectivity and above average digital performance scores—no, the real problem was that IT’s attention was limited only to Teams (among other responsibilities). This meant that any performance issues that sprung up in one of the other three non-approved tools would continuously run unchecked before a larger problem would tax the entire network.

Without complete end to end device monitoring, these issues remained hidden from IT until a user would raise a ticket.

Opening up Nexthink’s experience management platform, IT was able to quickly track every single activity taken on their employees’ devices. They had visibility over what applications their employees downloaded; what versions they used; how much data they generated; and a host of other critical endpoint information.

In particular, IT uncovered that most of their company devices registered strong Skype experience scores and that employees favored this tool even if they hadn’t installed it! Taking those two factors into account, IT decided to add Skype to their official technology stack.

IT also discovered from our experience dashboards, that many remote workers registered poor Teams experiences, not for fault of the application, but because those devices were working under older office 365 licenses.

In just a few clicks, their team was able to drill-down to these users and send a targeted on-screen campaign to connect remotely and quickly get them up and running.

Moving forward, this customer’s IT department is using our platform to rectify any performance issues with Skype or Teams (dropped calls, network latency, etc.) by sending targeted campaigns to users that offer practical tips to improve their experience.

For example, a week after deploying Skype, some users experienced a sudden drop in connectivity. With Nexthink’s alert system, IT was immediately notified and they were able to quickly identify that the drop came from a weak Wi-Fi signal and not the Zoom application. In just a few clicks, IT then sent out a Nexthink on-screen message to those affected users, instructing them to move closer to their routers.

Poor Skype and Teams performance was attributed to a weak Wi-Fi signal

Understanding the why can put your IT team ahead

With millions of remote employers logging into work every day, you can guarantee many of them are using non-approved apps and services.  It’s up to technology support then to see the full picture and learn from their employees’ perspectives.

IT can aim higher and understand why their employees choose certain tools over others and still keep their company secure and employees happy and productive.

Tech support just needs the right platform to show them that sometimes they can learn from their employees’ shadow IT tools and use that knowledge to advance their business.

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding remote work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have Questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Shadow IT: Why Tech Support Comes Up Short appeared first on Nexthink.

For a lot of Nexthink’s technical professionals, 2020 has been one of the most challenging and rewarding periods of their professional lives.

Our customer base was impacted globally by COVID-19, and we were honored to be able to support them whenever and however we could, working closely to leverage their existing investment, as well as developing and distributing tailored services for those that needed them.

We’ve covered a number of these stories right here, and today we’re proud to launch the first in our ‘Through the crisis’ series, where you’ll hear directly from many customers about the challenges and successes they’ve experienced over the recent months.

Naturally, these customers are talking to us from their own homes.

Our first contribution comes from Christophe Verducci, Head of Proximity Services for France at the leading financial services provider AXA IM.

“We need Nexthink on a daily basis,” Christophe told us, “because it’s paramount to adapt and to guarantee the quality of support – especially working from home.” Check out the full statement here:

We also caught up with Christophe (under very different circumstances) at last year’s Experience ’19 event. There he explained how AXA IM had created a special internal IT brand, ‘Precogs’ (shout out to Minority Report), to highlight their proactive support to employees.

You can enjoy that here:

We think both interviews together make for a strong testament to our capacity to support customers like AXA IM both in a pre and post-COVID world.

Nexthink is here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have Questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Through the crisis: Nexthink customer stories (AXA IM) appeared first on Nexthink.

After working in enterprise IT for over 20 years, I’ve come to the realization that most departments suffer from the same underlying contradiction.

By nature, we IT professionals are a logic-seeking, detail-oriented bunch. Much of our work can take months, if not years, of meticulous planning and research. We find comfort in gazing upon complex, multi-colored scrum boards and searching for answers to problems that any sane person would avoid.

Yet oddly, when it comes to upgrading company hardware (and in many instances, software or network systems) many IT departments take a very unscientific and rudimentary approach. Rather than acting based on event and end user data, IT will pick random dates in the future to make wholesale changes to their inventory. And from the companies I’ve seen (many of which are fortune 500 businesses), this swap typically occurs every few years, and sometimes on an annual basis.

I’m not saying that updating to the latest version of anything is a bad idea. But what most IT professionals don’t know—through no fault of their own—is that many of their existing devices are better off being reclaimed than replaced.

Don’t throw away money

One of our customers, a busy city hospital in North America, always comes to mind when I think about needless hardware expenditures. The hospital’s IT department budgeted roughly $2.5M to replace 3,000 computers—which consisted of a mix and mash of workstations on wheels (WOW), visitor kiosks, back office desktops, and take-home laptops. With our help, IT was able to save over $900K from their budget by reclaiming unused systems and upgrading the memory in some of their devices.

$2.5M for new hardware is no small change, but I’ve seen larger organizations (+20,000 devices) dwarf even that figure. And sometimes, just the sheer logistics of a hardware deployment can cause plenty of problems for IT. With remote work more prevalent than ever these days, many tech leaders might be wondering: do we replace our employees’ devices this year? Should employees drop off their old laptops at the office? Do we (IT) then mail them new devices and is that safe?

Thankfully, there’s an easy way to avoid these problems. Our patented technology helps IT make better decisions on how to handle their inventory and save money. Using our real-time digital experience dashboards and dynamically generated, end-to-end network maps, the hospital’s IT department was able to track every connection made on those 3,000 company devices.

This capability enabled IT to determine what software (and which versions) lived on their employees’ devices; how their business applications performed; and how much data their devices used.

Nexthink customers receive clear guidance on unique remediation actions and cost/benefit breakdowns

The power of Digital Employee Experience data

Thanks to our platform, IT was able to quickly organize the hospital’s 3,000 devices into 4 categories:

1. Healthy, used – 733 computers recorded a strong PC health experience score (9 or above, out of a 10 point scale)
2. Healthy, not used – 428 computers were perfectly healthy, but nobody was using them!
3. Not healthy, used – 1,330 computers were outdated and being used by employees and patients. IT decided to replace most of these machines with newer versions (the original budget was to replace 3,000!).
4. Not healthy, not used – 380 devices were essentially “junk” machines, so IT reclaimed and discarded them.

Narrowing in on the 3,000 devices, the IT department was able to measure their employees’ PC health on a scale of 1 – 10, and drill-down into the issues that were impacting those results, all in the same platform.

Nexthink’s scoring system helped IT to identify 428 perfectly healthy and underutilized computers. They later discovered that these unused devices sat idle in empty rooms and hallways. Leveraging our persona mapping, IT was able to re-purpose these computers for nurse staff (WOW stations) and patient kiosks. IT also discovered that they only needed to replace a little less than half (roughly 1,330 computers) of their original budget (3,000)—and some were saved after a simple memory upgrade, a task completed in just a few clicks with our built-in remediations.

Real change that makes an indelible mark on the business

Our customers find that the less time they spend troubleshooting issues, the more time they have to deploy complicated digital transformation projects and drive innovation. Our digital experience management platform helps them shore up IT spend, resolve problems faster, and foster better decision making.

Have Questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

Nick Morea, Senior Solution Consultant

The post Hospital’s IT Almost Wastes $900k on Hardware appeared first on Nexthink.

Though there is an entire industry devoted to telling you otherwise, most people prefer to work for large organizations. On the one hand, their appeal makes perfect sense. Big employers offer higher salaries, better benefits, and a longer employee tenure.

Yet, there are some noticeable wrinkles that come with life in a large organization. Chief among them, bigger companies often exhibit a poor overall Digital Employee Experience. Research conducted by Vanson Bourne shows that over half of office workers believe IT issues are an accepted norm at their companies, and that on average, each worker experiences roughly 100 technology interruptions per year. At a company of 10,000 employees, these interruptions can cost businesses up to $25 million.

Add in the novelty of remote work and the inherent bureaucracy that can come with a big organization, and it’s apparent that IT has its work cut out for them.

Fortunately, our customers have flipped this script by using Nexthink to fix their most pressing technology problems and to cut through their organizational silos.

Big but lean – solving IT issues across 8,500 devices

With the right tech, IT can make even the biggest and most bureaucratic of organizations become agile and resilient. One of our customers, a large public administration agency in France, is the perfect example.

When COVID hit this year, their IT department had to safely and quickly transition 8,000 employees to a remote work environment (the remaining 500 stayed onsite). The agency was organized more like a loose federation of kingdoms than a single enterprise—employees spanned 47 different departments, each with their own IT manager to look after their digital demands. Some staff were mobile and equipped with laptops, but most were onsite, desktop-bound employees. Each department’s IT manager reported into the agency’s central IT department, but like many big organizations, this team had little insight into how their employees were experiencing and consuming the company’s private networks, business applications, and work devices.

Moving to remote work, prompted IT to use Nexthink to help address a number of critical objectives:

Ensure endpoint VPN readiness

• The agency’s employees had to leave the office on such short notice that IT didn’t have the capacity to run a proper readiness assessment using their existing ITSM tools. With Nexthink’s dashboards, their IT department was able to immediately diagnose whether their employees’ devices (laptop and desktop), and their VPNs and Firewalls were ready to move offsite.

Use our readiness assessment dashboards to guide your next digital transformation project.

Adjust VPN licenses to match employee demand

• Previously, IT’s network team could only track the number of open sessions on their VPNs, but that was about it. They had no idea what users connected to each of their networks and how much data they consumed. Nexthink revealed this information in real-time, allowing IT to monitor the exact number of VPN licenses that were active and how much data each user withdrew from the network.

Identify the root causes to your network, application, and end user problems.

Certify endpoint compliance

• Each department’s IT manager needed a way to ensure their employees’ devices were successfully encrypted. Using Nexthink’s remote automations, they were able to instantly unlock health information on their devices’ TPM chips. They could see whether these chips were installed and active, what versions they had, and confirm their BIOS was working correctly—all information that allowed these IT managers to diagnose hundreds of endpoints in just a few days.

Nexthink’s experience scoring system makes it easy for support to cross-check device, system, software, & network compliance

Deploy Microsoft Exchange 2016 without end user issues:

• IT was also in the process of migrating from MS Exchange 2010 to 2016. There were several complaints from employees that Outlook was slow, but the L1 and L2 help desk couldn’t determine if this was an application or network issue. Using Nexthink’s digital experience score system, IT was able to quickly detect a pattern: every time the agency’s Outlook score dropped, the VPN would crash. Within the same Nexthink UI, both L1 and L2 technicians were able to drill-down into their users’ application and network experience data and fix any errors with our built-in remediation scripts.

Our integrations with popular ITSM tools like Service Now, empower L1 and L2 technicians to solve problems faster

Understand employee computing context

• IT was understandably nervous about how their employees would respond to working remotely, especially for those that had never done this before. But using Nexthink’s endpoint targeting and on-screen messaging features, they were able to collect helpful feedback from users regarding their VPN experience and open a line of communication that was more direct and user friendly.

Our on-screen messaging and targeting features help IT corroborate hard data with unique employee insights.

Endpoint protection at home or in the office

Planning for an eventual return to the office, the agency’s IT team will be using Nexthink to conduct a full scan of their employees’ devices to ensure they have the latest antivirus protection and are safe enough to connect back to their internal network.

Our critical services dashboards are helping IT to monitor their employees’ remote devices and ensure they continue to have the latest VPN certificates and collaboration tools, and that their firewalls, malware and user accounts are correctly installed and stable.

With all 47 IT managers using Nexthink, the agency has achieved a level of transparency they never thought was possible. Not bad for a big, “bureaucratic”, public agency.

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding remote work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post IT Eases WFH Transition, Cuts Down Agency’s Bureaucracy appeared first on Nexthink.

As we announced last week, the Nexthink ‘Through the Crisis’ series gives our customers a voice to talk about what the challenges of 2020 have been like for them professionally – working from home while trying to cope with the huge upsurge in demand and responsibility.

This week we’re very proud to share some stories from ABN AMRO, starting with Jelmer Berendsen (Enablement Lead, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO), who explains how the organization was able to leverage Nexthink Engage in order to measure both digital employee experience and general employee well-being during the crisis.

Next, Daan Tuijnman (Product Owner, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO), runs through just a few of the many other ways they were able to support employees during the crisis, wherever they were working from.

If you want further insight into the incredible service ABN AMRO provides its users, be sure to register for the upcoming CMSWire webinar, Driving the Flexible Workplace: Experience and IT in the New World, where Dan and Jelmer will be joined by Forrester’s Andrew Hewitt to explore why the best technology teams are implementing a digital employee experience framework.

Nexthink is here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have Questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Through the crisis: Nexthink customer stories (ABN AMRO) appeared first on Nexthink.

Are most companies right now thinking ‘everybody back to the office’, or ‘remote work forever’?

My guess is neither.

There is still too much uncertainty for businesses to lean heavily towards one option or the other. Instead, flexible work makes the most practical sense right now and I imagine that won’t change for some time. Yet, with flexible work can come plenty of compliance problems that can frustrate even the most agile and experienced of IT departments.

Unfortunately, when these issues surface, employees are unable to access their work applications and systems, and as a result, businesses can lose millions in productivity costs and data loss. Learn what compliance issues prevent IT from creating a positive digital employee experience and how Nexthink can help.

1) VPN certificate compliance

VPNs are a popular choice for most flexible work environments, but IT support often struggles to effectively manage which of their certificates are compliant, and which are soon to expire. I know of many technicians that still use Outlook reminders to keep tabs on their certificate expirations—a risky approach that opens the door for human error.

IT also struggles to move fast enough to support employees when they are in flux. If a company needs to quickly bring their employees back into the office, or set them up remotely, using something like a service desk CMDB can only retain limited certificate information from end users, and this data often times is updated in batches, only once every few weeks.

Renew your network certificates quickly with Nexthink’s remote actions

With Nexthink’s patented technology, IT can access real-time certificate information at any moment; drill-down and investigate exact certificates that have expired, or are soon-to-expire; and they can quickly reset them with our built-in remote actions.

2) Password compliance

Likewise, many employees lose time having to unexpectedly reset their passwords, especially if they frequently transition between a corporate intranet and VPN, or if they use an SSO to access their work tools. The onus shouldn’t be on employees to remember when their passwords will expire—their job isn’t to manage their own digital work experience. IT, on the other hand, struggles to remind users about their passwords, they send out email campaigns or post to internal comms tools, but rarely do people actually read those messages.

Instead, IT can use our platform to send out targeted, on-screen messages to employees at the right time and in the right context. In just a few clicks, IT can send one-off campaigns or set automated messages to continually reach their end users. This feature of the Nexthink platform receives 80% employee response rates—something no other IT tool can replicate.

3) Device encryption

Flexible work environments also can pose a challenge for IT when it comes to protecting their employees’ devices. If workers are constantly coming and going from the office, operational mistakes can happen—an employee might unknowingly take an unencrypted device offsite, or similarly, they might bring a remote laptop into the office that has a piece of malware installed on it, which could bring down the company’s entire corporate network.

Nexthink device encryption insights

Luckily, our platform can help IT avoid those scary scenarios by showing exactly how many of their devices are encrypted at all times, regardless of where their employees work. We also provide the capability for IT to use remote actions that will automatically encrypt their employees’ devices without disturbing their computing experience, and IT can access our simple dashboards to corroborate the performance of any employee device, at any moment.

4) OS versions 

Most enterprises have employees that use a mix of operating systems, some with Windows 10, others with older versions. This type of variety can pose a challenge for IT when trying to corroborate and diagnose their employees’ computing problems. A Windows 10 update, for example, can prevent Windows 10 users from experiencing crashes, but for employees on older operating systems, well, they might be out luck.

We allow IT to quickly corroborate every single one of their employees’ digital experiences with their accompanying OS. This insight gives IT the power to determine whether an end-user problem truly emanates from the system itself, or somewhere else.

5) VPN/Firewall versions

It can also be a challenge for IT to manage their VPN software and firewall versions, and to understand how that software truly impacts their employees’ work experiences. Many organizations have a specific compliance level that each network and security software must meet, but knowing how employees respond to those services is largely a mystery. There isn’t another tool in market that can show IT how their VPN software is actually being consumed by employees, nor is there a simpler way to check, in real-time, whether their antivirus and firewall applications are installed correctly on every employee device. Firewalls, in particular, are often disabled by IT to carry out routine tasks, but getting them re-enabled can be a slow and manual process.

Nexthink VPN version dispersion dashboard

With Nexthink, IT can access every VPN and firewall executable in their infrastructure and see how their employees are interacting with that software. Paired with the rest of our compliance dashboards, this level of insight gives IT the capability to quickly pivot and support employees transitioning back to the office or while they work remotely.

Vincent Dias, Solution Consultant

Nexthink is helping several enterprise tech teams solve their most demanding flexible work problems. We’re here to advance the Digital Employee Experience, whether people work from home or the office.

Have questions? Contact Us

Interested in seeing how our Remote Worker Experience library pack works? Watch Our Demos

The post Cracked – 5 Annoying Compliance Problems for IT & Flexible Work appeared first on Nexthink.