The global corporate landscape is on the brink of a complete premises lockdown in light of the COVID-19 crisis. Service disruption is inevitable, and enterprises’ business continuity plans are being put to the test. Despite this challenge, it’s heartening to see companies across nations take quick steps to ensure the health and safety of their employees during these trying times.

As organizations switch their entire workforce to a default work-from-home (WFH) policy as part of social distancing, ManageEngine and our parent company, Zoho, are intimately familiar with the complications that can arise from this situation. Efforts are already underway in Zoho to help impacted businesses sustain effective collaborations between remote teams. After all, we run our business with 8,000+ employees located around the world—a majority of whom are now working from home.  

Besides facilitating employee communication and productivity, keeping infrastructure and data center services up and running presents a different predicament. Enterprise IT teams tasked with network maintenance and data center support services constantly need access to critical systems like servers, applications, databases, and network devices. Opening up remote access to such sensitive systems by provisioning multiple VPNs is high-risk, especially when cybercriminals are scanning the web for vulnerable VPN connections they can exploit to gain access to critical information systems.

As part of their WFH policies, enterprises should also ensure that their IT teams adopt a secure work approach within their home offices. Putting those policies into effect means giving teams the tools they need to remotely connect to their critical business systems and applications and execute their routine tasks—without compromising IT security.

To empower IT teams to act quickly and securely while working from home, we bring you our Secure Remote Access Toolkit.

ManageEngine Secure Remote Access Toolkit

The Secure Remote Access Toolkit includes Access Manager Plus and Remote Access Plus, our solutions for IT maintenance and support teams working remotely. These solutions will help in streamlining enterprise IT management processes and operations while WFH policies are in place and for protecting critical assets from unauthorized access risks.

Keeping the current crisis in mind, we are offering free, fully functional licenses for our remote access solutions—Access Manager Plus and Remote Access Plus—until July 1, 2020, to help businesses run their infrastructure and data center operations safely.

Put this toolkit to work for your organization. Claim your free licenses here.

ManageEngine Access Manager Plus
The web-based privileged sessions management component of our toolkit, Access Manager Plus enables IT teams to launch remote privileged connections to critical information systems without a VPN.

Key features

  • One-click remote sessions – Secure single sign-on capabilities for RDP, SSH, SQL, and VNC connections to remote hosts via encrypted gateways.

  • RemoteApp support for Windows – Allow users and third parties to locally access applications installed on a remote Windows server.

  • Privileged session recording – Record every privileged user session, and store them as video files in an AES-256 encrypted database for post-session review.

  • Live monitoring and collaboration – Shadow user sessions and achieve dual controls. Terminate anomalous sessions instantly, and revoke access to prevent misuse.

ManageEngine Remote Access Plus
The web-based remote desktop management component of our toolkit, Remote Access Plus equips IT technicians with multi-platform support for Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints. 

Key features

  • Advanced remote control – Next-generation remote control with integrated tools to initiate chats, send/receive files, blacken end-users’ monitors, and more.

  • Granular control over computers – Remotely control specific user sessions, record and audit remote sessions, and reconnect to sessions after rebooting.

  • Over 12 handy diagnostic tools – Resolve issues at lightning speed with remote access to Command Prompt, remote access to Registry, Windows File Manager, Event Log Viewer, and a lot more.

  • Comprehensive assistance – Request users’ approval prior to remote sessions, and utilize 256-bit AES encryption and two-factor authentication.

COVID-19 is catalyzing profound, global change in the way people work. And it’s driving a powerful, global response from organizations large and small who are working to ensure the safety and well-being of customers, employees, partners, and the rest of our communities. Working from home is just one way we’re all going to mitigate the fallout from this pandemic and Secure Remote Access Toolkit is just one way we’re helping to make WFH a reality.

Illustrations: Dorathe Victor