Managing hybridized environments and seamlessly blending traditional and contemporary services, to ensure consistent operations, always throws new challenges at IT admins. In such settings, system administrators and help desk professionals are often spending so much time interacting with service providers, and dealing with the increased volume of help desk requests, that there aren’t many resources left to handle end-user computers.
This resource crunch represents a major problem as a great deal of work is still getting done on typical workstations and laptop PCs, but who is doing that work and the tasks that users are handling can be extremely varied. As a result, device settings, account permissions and similar small changes can add up one-by-one over time to create an incredibly chaotic and unmanageable environment. IT teams need tools to get end-user devices under control and back in business, otherwise, help desk users will be left scrambling when trying to help individuals with basic problems.
When you get behind on managing end-user computers, you can end up facing such questions as, “why can’t I sign on to the VPN?” or even, “This software worked yesterday, but I can’t login today. What’s going on?” Wrestling with such mundane issues can be time-consuming, and it can also distract IT users from innovative projects and similarly valuable work.
Deep Freeze patented ‘Reboot to Restore’ technology allows for one-touch remediation, allowing you to reset systems to working settings quickly and establish a much more stable, secure configuration.
Five ways how Deep Freeze helps in resolving computer remediation issues in enterprise environments are:
1. Reboot to Restore Mechanism
With enterprise IT departments contending with users accessing a variety of PCs, often from multiple locations, there can be a great deal of temptation to simply restrict access. However, enterprise users aren’t likely to respond well when you tell them they can’t complete a key work task because IT support doesn’t have time to reconfigure their machine properly for the current work environment.
Reboot to Restore solutions allow organizations to eliminate restriction by setting machines up with secure settings and authentication requirements and enforcing those on all devices. Deep Freeze simply resets correct settings when the system reboots, ensuring malicious software can’t stick around, reducing the maintenance burden on IT teams and freeing workers from tedious configuration issues.
2. Support for Windows and Mac Devices
Device diversity is a major challenge in today’s enterprise IT climate, but one issue that often slips beneath the radar in all the mobility conversations is the simple variance between Windows PCs and Mac computers in many businesses. With Macs being naturally suited to many design and creative professions, plenty of businesses end up in a situation where they are supporting a small, but not insignificant, quantity of these devices alongside Windows PCs. This variety can lead to configuration management challenges that are eased by the reboot to restore functionality offered by Deep Freeze.
3. Back to Business with One-touch Remediation
Using Deep Freeze, rebooting a system effectively cancels out any changes to the underlying settings, permissions and configuration elements of a device. For example, if a zero-day threat slips in through a phishing scheme and changes the device setup to gain permission to view sensitive files, the reboot will remediate that change and immediately limit the damage that could be done.
Help desk teams must usually go through multiple manual analysis and change processes to handle remediation. By freezing the correct setup behind a reboot cycle, the task becomes a simple one-touch effort.
4. Maintain Standard Operating Environments
Exceptions can become nightmares for IT teams. Giving one group of users a certain set of solutions while another is configured distinctly can be a problem – not so much because it’s difficult to set up in the first place, but because it becomes almost impossible to manage and maintain effectively over time. All it takes is one or two users in a group to change roles or get special permission for something and your ability to regulate the environment disappears.
Deep Freeze allows you to standardize your operating environment for various endpoints and use the reboot-to-restore functionality to automatically enforce those configurations across all devices.
5. Eliminate Dormant/ Undetected Threats
As we mentioned earlier, a reboot will restore settings, eliminating the malicious changes that are undetected. For example, if a user plugs a compromised flash drive into a device and the malware installed therein makes a change, Deep Freeze will undo the alteration with the reboot. Many data breaches involve threats that reside quietly on systems, making tiny changes over time until they gain access to something sensitive. Deep Freeze makes such an attack impossible.
IT departments have an opportunity to get out of the overwhelming and expensive maintenance loop that can leave them vulnerable. Deep Freeze’s ability to provide one-touch remediation can transform the help desk and support, and in doing so, prove vital to sustained innovation in enterprise IT settings.
For more information on how Deep Freeze enables one-touch remediation, contact Faronics today.