Expanding your remote workforce can have a significant effect on network infrastructure, security, and corporate culture. Progent has 20 years of experience assisting SMBs to plan, deploy, administer, tune, and debug IT environments that incorporate work-from-home employees. Progent can assist your Pittsburgh company to pick the right technologies and follow leading practices in building and maintaining a secure virtual ecosystem for telecommuters that promotes collaboration and returns top value. Progent can provide support services that go from as-needed expertise for helping you past challenging technical roadblocks to comprehensive project management or co-management to help you carry out mission-critical initiatives.
Progent can help Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania organizations to with any aspect of building a high-performing work-at-home ecosystem by delivering infrastructure configuration services, IP voice expertise, video conferencing support, collaboration platform selection and deployment, public cloud connectivity, Help Desk augmentation, endpoint security, data protection solutions, and centralized management.
Infrastructure for an At-Home Workforce
Configuring the physical and software infrastructure required for a remote work environment can be especially challenging if you have to accommodate a combination of worker-owned hardware like desktop computers and notebooks, Internet routers, and wireless appliances from various manufacturers and with a mix of OS software and firmware levels. Progent's experience delivering online support for both outdated as well as current IT products in remote office venues allows you to make cost-effective use of your existing infrastructure and offers fast access to top-tire consultants for implement necessary upgrades. Support services available from Progent to help your company to implement a high-functioning telecommuting infrastructure include:
IP Voice Solutions for Telecommuters
Expanding the corporate phone system to accommodate remote users is critical to supporting a productive at-home workforce. A variety of cloud-based digital PBX products are used by SMBs to server teleworkers. Many enterprises depend on Cisco's current or older products for IP voice management. Progent can help organizations of all sizes to design or tune a telecommuter VoIP environment that delivers the flexibility, transparency and protection required for remote users. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE Voice consultants offer advanced support to assist businesses tune their current Cisco VoIP environments to handle an expanding remote workforce.
Voice/Video Conferencing for Telecommuters
A broad selection of voice/video conferencing platforms from leading technology companies support virtual meetings, video conferencing, chat sessions, and screen sharing for both local workers and teleworkers. Many companies utilize a mix of conferencing products to accommodate their different partners and customers. Progent can help your organization to maintain your existing conferencing ecosystem and optimize the experience of your remote employees.
Microsoft Collaboration Software for At-Home Workers
Microsoft's collaboration products are closely integrated with Microsoft's popular Office suites, offering a powerful environment of applications that create a cohesive user interface for sharing data and ideas throughout multiple sites and on a wide range of endpoint devices. Progent has provided online consulting support for SharePoint and Exchange since their original releases and can help businesses to configure these flagship collaboration products to maximize the productivity of your at-home workforce.
SharePoint uses web entities to enable collaboration and information sharing by providing policy-driven delivery of data, workflow, and utilities for searching through company-wide information silos. SharePoint allows you to build secure portals that enables remote workforce to see and update consolidated business intelligence by means of Intranets (Wikis), Blogs, social web sites, and Web Parts. To find out about Progent's SharePoint consulting services, visit SharePoint integration and application development expertise.
Exchange and Exchange Online offer secure collaboration features including public folders, shared mailboxes, and shared calendars and contacts. Progent's Microsoft certified Exchange experts can show you how to activate and utilize these features for your at-home workers. For information about Progent's Exchange consulting expertise, refer to deployment consulting for Exchange.
OneDrive is Microsoft’s collaborative cloud-based file hosting and synchronization service, comparable to GoogleDrive. Remote workers can save files to the OneDrive service, and co-workers anywhere can retrieve them securely through a web browser. Included with Office 365, OneDrive enables at-home workers to co-author files. Edits created offline are automatically uploaded when you reconnect to the Internet. To learn about Progent's consulting expertise for OneDrive, visit Microsoft Onedrive integration consulting.
Cloud Integration for Remote Workers
Progent offers affordable online assistance for enabling businesses to build, manage and repair integrated hybrid network architectures that incorporate internal data centers, at-home workers, branch offices, and cloud services. Progent offers expertise for all modes of cloud service delivery including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Progent can help remote workers resolve problems with public cloud connectivity, authentication, and cybersecurity.
Microsoft Azure is a leading family of public cloud services that allows you to utilize infrastructure, servers, and key apps hosted on Microsoft's massive cloud. Azure features more than 100 services services such as the ability to host Windows and Linux-powered VMs, on-demand cloud storage, messaging, app development with Visual Studio, and backup/restore. Progent can help you to deploy virtual machines on Azure Virtual Machines, integrate storage on Azure Storage services, unify identity control with Azure Active Directory, and design data backup and recovery systems with Azure Backup. Progent can also help you create secure connections to Azure for remote workers by configuring and debugging firewall appliances and VPN IPsec tunnels. To find out about Progent's expertise for Azure, see Microsoft Azure consulting.
Office 365, now called Microsoft 365, is Microsoft's popular suite of client productivity software and cloud-based services offered by subscription. Office apps and cloud services are provided in a variety of bundles intended for customers ranging from students and households to major corporations. Progent offers quick and easy remote contact with consultants knowledgeable about Microsoft 365-compatible clients running Windows, Mac, iOS, and Google Android technology. Progent's experts can assist you to evaluate the numerous subscription plans available for Office 365 and configure 365 apps for your at-home workers to achieve top business value. For details about Progent's support services for Microsoft Office 365, visit Office 365 consulting support.
Office 365 Exchange Online is one of the most popular cloud-based applications in Azure-hosted Office 365 product line. Office 365 Exchange Online offers the advantages of reduced costs for physical infrastructure, simplified management, dynamic scaling, high reliability, and additional advantages associated with cloud computing. Microsoft has designed Office 365 Exchange Online to run smoothly with on-premises deployments of Exchange, allowing customers to create hybrid cloud/onsite information systems. Progent's Exchange consultants are available for as-needed help to guide you past tough technical bottlenecks and can also provide comprehensive project management outsourcing to ensure your at-home workers have convenient and safe access to your Exchange Online environment. For details Progent's consulting expertise for Office 365 Exchange Online, refer to Exchange Online integration and support expertise.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a trailblazer in the public cloud computing arena and is the world's leading provider of cloud-based services. Progent offers rapid and affordable online access to cloud integration experts who can assist your organization to plan, deploy, manage, and debug hybrid IT networks that incorporate Amazon AWS cloud-based services with local resources and with other public clouds such as Microsoft Azure. Progent also offers the skills of Cisco-certified CCIE networking experts to assist you to build a high-availability network architecture so your users have a productive computing experience whether they are working from your main office, a branch office, from home, or on the move. For details about Progent's consulting expertise for Amazon AWS, visit Amazon AWS consulting services.
Google Cloud is a leading set of public cloud services that provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service products. Progent's certified Microsoft, Linux, and Cisco experts can help your organization to extend your current IT resources with the Google Cloud, and Progent's DBA experts can show you how to make your mission-critical apps cloud ready so your remote workers can benefit fully from Google Cloud services. Progent's consultants can assist you to deploy VMs on GCP Compute Engine, plan a cost-effective storage system with GCP Storage, and streamline access management for remote workers with Google Cloud Identity services. Progent's experts can also help your organization to utilize GCP's management tools to administer and track your GCP ecosystem. For information, go to Google Cloud Platform integration expertise.
Help Desk Call Center Services for Telecommuters
A rapid, enterprise-wide changeover to a telecommuter business model, which might be driven by a pandemic or as a component of a disaster recovery/business continuity preparedness plan, can overwhelm even a high-performing in-house Call Desk. Progent's Call Center services allow organizations to outsource or supplement their Support Desk by using Progent's online Technical Response Center services.
Security for Remote Workers
At-home workers often use their own equipment and work in a physically unsecured space. This worsens their vulnerability to cyber attacks and requires careful use of firewalls, remote endpoint monitoring, and the enforcement of security policies that follow best practices. Progent's seasoned team of certified data security experts can help your organization to design, implement and administer a modern security environment that safeguards sensitive data in IT networks that include telecommuters.
Data Protection for Teleworkers
The field of Data Protection covers backing up and restoring vital information so as to avoid data loss and minimize restoration time and effort in the event of storage system failures due to equipment breakdowns, programming hiccups, human error, cyber attack, or other causes. Dependable data protection solutions can be especially difficult to design and manage in hybrid environments that combine in-house data centers, cloud resources, and an at-home workforce.
Unified Management for an At-Home Workforce
Microsoft has rebranded and reshuffled its endpoint management products under the name Endpoint Manager, which encompasses Intune for cloud management of mobile and remote devices and Configuration Manager for managing on-premises computers. Microsoft Endpoint Manager features a unified platform for protecting critical information by managing on-premises, mobile, and home-based endpoints.
Microsoft Intune
Intune is part of Microsoft's Endpoint Management family that also includes Microsoft Configuration Manager. Intune is a cloud-based service for managing and securing remote devices and software. Managed endpoint computers can be personally owned or business owned. Network admins managing the enrolled endpoint computers of teleworkers can utilize Intune to deploy and validate apps on managed devices, push updates and certificates, set up rules for accessing data and resources, set passwords, establish VPN connections, control how home-based workers share information, set up threat protection, verify security compliance, and wipe corporate information from lost, stolen or deactivated endpoint devices. Microsoft Intune works with iOS, Google Android, Windows, and macOS/OS X devices. For details about Microsoft Intune and to find out how Progent can help your company to use Microsoft's Endpoint Management to administer the endpoint devices of your at-home workers, visit Intune teleworker endpoint management expertise.
VMware Workspace ONE
VMware Workspace ONE is an advanced centralized Mobile Device Management product that allows network managers to keep off-premises endpoint devices current and protected. Workspace ONE incorporates VMware AirWatch for centralized endpoint management along with VMware's Horizon virtual application delivery technology for authorization control, app management, and setup management of endpoint devices. Workspace ONE runs with devices powered by Windows 10, macOS, Apple iOS, Google Android, Chrome OS, or popular distributions of Linux. VMware Workspace ONE is available by subscription as a cloud-based service or as an on-site product via a one-time purchase. Key features of VMware Workspace ONE include fast remote provisioning of out-of-the-box laptops, quick onboarding of new employees, policy set up and enforcement for all categories of endpoints, unifies management reporting and performance analytics, an email encryption gateway, and integration with Microsoft applications and cloud products. To find out about Progent's support for VMware Workspace ONE, go to VMware Workspace ONE mobile device management expertise.
Contact Progent for At-Home Worker Support Services
To get in touch with Progent about building and maintaining a productive work-from-home environment for your Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania organization, phone