I’ve seen this Denial Of Service (DoS) come up only in corporate environments. With each major operating system update I’ve seen the effects amplify in longer durations of attack. The DoS easily evades any security monitoring and threat detection solutions. Anti-virus software is an enabler rather than a protector. Symptoms include CPU pinned at 100% for extended periods causing you to lose data and having to reboot the hard way – pulling power and/or battery.
For corporate “road warriors” this DoS often gets mis-diagnosed as a hardware issues at first (such as flaky hard drive) and when the issue persists the laptop completely replaced. Not good when your “road warriors” are often your revenue generators.
What DoS is this that wreaks havoc with lost productivity, costly to accurately diagnose, and improves with technology?
IT Management Solutions for Desktops/Laptops.
When all corporate users were on LANs and when “road warriors” were just a handful of part-time remote users IT management solutions for desktops/laptops served us well. The user experience was readily measurable given the majority of the apps were corporate and web apps in the minority of critical applications to the corporation.
But many of these IT Management solutions are failing when the “road warriors” are a significant share or outnumber residents of corporate brick and mortar. “Road Warriors” may never visit an office and connect from most anywhere across untrusted networks of varying bandwidth to an ecosystem of corporate applications that include direct connection to trusted third parties. As the business culture and operating model changes for a corporation, the IT Management strategy needs to evolve as well starting with people understanding the culture the business is operating in and then identify process and technology that should be applied.
While standard reports run on your CRM and IT Management solutions might give you a picture, it may not show you the “road warriors” that have quietly dropped off the “corporate IT grid” through re-imaging their corporate asset or not using it altogether and perhaps using something else to avoid the “DoS attack” to their productivity. Only dialogue between those responsible for IT Management solutions and the business is going to show you a true picture of the problem and how to best address managing assets while enabling productivity.
There are a number of ways to solve this problem but it all starts with IT management running a mile in today’s “road warrior’s” shoes.
For what it’s worth,
– Joe