at Jacopo Bruni, Marketing Manager at Praim

16 July 2019

When we talk about Smart Working the first concepts that come to mind are: flexibility, freedom, modernity. Are we really sure these are the right words to describe it? How many of us believe that Smart Working is the turning point for growing our business? Smart Working literally means "Working in an intelligent, astute way"... obviously nothing against it and, I would add, thank goodness! But, if we contextualize this concept, it can still have different facets depending on whether we talk about it from the worker's point of view, from the employer's point of view, from the IT Manager's point of view and so on. Let's take a closer look at the pros and cons of the adoption of Smart Working in a corporate context, starting from the main characteristics such as: working regardless of place, time and above all working towards objectives.

Therefore, the main benefits they are (or should be): having greater autonomy, being able to take responsibility, fueling a meritocratic mechanism, limiting homicidal instincts towards an unbearable colleague, sleeping an extra half hour in the morning and avoiding stress behind the wheel. But there are also gods versus (and these really are), such as: risking working too much or too little, losing control over activities, risking not valuing work correctly, reducing the ease of working in a team and socializing, paying higher electricity bills at home and, joking aside, creating possible problems with company security.

One of the main critical issues of Smart Working revolves around this last point, which appears to have a serious impact more than anything else on the activities of the corporate IT Manager, namely the protection of information. Data is the lifeblood of every business, the true intangible capital, the most precious asset of any business and, as is done with precious assets, it should be kept and protected in a highly efficient and as impenetrable virtual safe.

This is where all the skills of IT managers come into play, but not only. The first step is to make the company information system as safe as possible. This should happen on numerous levels: internally and externally, at the server level and at the client level, etc. Security, understood as securing the IT infrastructure, is a long process full of obstacles, which often (or at least it should be) many vendors should enter.

So the first thought is to adopt antivirus, anti-malware, anti-spam and firewall solutions. Then comes the turn of backups, replication and high availability. Then the mind goes to the adoption of cloud solutions, and so on, little by little the data is truly protected. But in the end do we also think about the best data management? Indeed, do you actually think about how to manage the entire company IT infrastructure? In essence, with the adoption of Smart Working, in part or in its entirety, the issue of the management and availability of company data becomes even more alive.

The company therefore becomes the fulcrum and must guarantee access to the data by internal and external users. Not only that, but the medium also changes, from the classic workstation to the plethora of both corporate and personal devices: PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, etc.

This new paradigm, both simpler and more complex, implies a total reorganization of corporate and non-corporate IT resources. In short, a great job for those who are responsible for securing information systems!

It may be trivial for many, but the advice in complex environments is to "normalize" as much as possible and in particular to adopt the cloud more and more and in an increasingly confident manner. When trying to solve the problem of complexity, it also comes naturally to think about choosing and managing the right endpoints.

Praim fits into a context like this, ensuring three fundamental characteristics: simplicity, centralization, convenience. Praim acts as a leading actor, easily supporting users in the various ongoing technological and digital transformation processes. It has gained leadership in the supply of complete systems for the creation and management of Thin & Zero Client software and hardware workstations and over the last 10 years it has recorded a progressive increase in the number of active customers, feedback which has pushed it to invest and further strengthen its support in the provision of future-proof solutions.

There are three macro areas within which Praim operates: Thin & Zero Client, endpoint software solutions e centralized management.

As suppliers of Thin & Zero Client solutions we have been leaders on the Italian market for years with safe, efficient hardware-based solutions, capable of reducing management and operational costs and also captivating, with essential, solid and elegant designs. Obviously the most important part is to equip our hardware with increasingly high-performance features in order to satisfy every type of market and every type of customer. The mantra remains unchanged, make our customers' lives easier.

Always based on this last concept, we are also able to provide a complete series of software solutions for endpoints that currently allow us to manage PCs, notebooks, third-party thin clients and Raspberry devices with a small but powerful component software named Agile. For practical purposes both Agile software solutions (Agile4PC and Agile4Pi) share the objective of simplifying access and execution of local and external resources and facilitating the user through an interface that guarantees a user-experience similar to that of a smartphone, including the possibility of customizing video resolution and configurations such as language, mouse and keyboard.

Another key piece of software that makes it recognizable is the Praim ThinOX4PC, a Linux-based operating system, completely developed by Praim that allows you to transform any hardware (of any brand) into a Praim Thin Client, entirely managed by our management solution. Simplification in various areas promotes multiple advantages, including: simplifying the fleet of company endpoints by standardizing operating systems, simplifying management by administering all endpoints easily with a centralized management product and simplifying the complex company security system.

The concept of "simplification" becomes practically vision when we get to talk about ThinMan Management Console, one of the most powerful and reliable centralized endpoint management tools on the market. ThinMan is the key element, which allows you to centrally manage Thin & Zero Client and PC devices and allows companies to make an effective investment, containing time and costs.

If manageability is important, ensuring secure access to devices is no less important. To ensure this, over the last year, Praim has released the solution ThinMan Smart Identity, an add-on that it developed for ThinMan Platinum Edition with the aim of guaranteeing controlled and optimized user access to their devices through the use of smart cards. ThinMan Smart Identity allows you to functionally and operationally implement a multi-factor authentication solution, manage user access and help strengthen the overall security posture of the IT infrastructure starting from the endpoints. Then there is support for the most popular cards, such as the National Service Card or the company badge.

In conclusion, we can say that the adoption of a model that includes Smart Working in the company, in whole or in part, is a big step towards the future and takes into account a wide-ranging vision of company management. However, the adoption of this model must take into account a wide series of factors that create opportunities while undermining corporate security and the protection system of one of the company's most fundamental resources: data. So, yes to Smart Working, but with the necessary precautions. First of all, particular attention in not falling into the frequent "traps" of control, limitation and extremes of remote working. The company, conceived precisely as a workplace, remains in my opinion a fundamental element of our daily life, of our socialization and of our professional growth, which is made up of data, results but above all of relationships.