How enterprises work has quickly changed over the past few weeks – to say the least! The work from home (WFH) impact on Content Services Platforms (CSP), also known as ECM and EIM based solutions, is not a business as usual scenario. To help ensure your business-critical content services can support WFH without interruption, we’ve put together 4 areas to focus on to stay ahead of the increasing day to day CSP operating challenges.
1. Service level / availability management is paramount so use active platform and user monitoring
Eyes on glass or manual help desk checklists are not practical during the surge on IT to enable WFH. Those new to WFH expect the same access service levels and even faster response time given human nature will reduce our patience during these times.
2. Minimize manual workarounds
Automate the repetitive CSP recovery actions using PowerShell (yes, it even supports Linux) or other CLI based actions. Given business priorities are to keep document ingestion flowing to feed the business processes, CSP app servers quickly serving up repository content, and communicating CSP user activity / transaction volume, all hiccup recovery must be quick. Research the root of the pain in the &^*&^! problem later as the problem event decomposition typically requires numerous non-linear conversations or online chats.
3. How is your CSP shared environment operating?
Find out by using the 3C’s of CSP operating metrics – collect, consider, and communicate. Know and communicate your user volumes (both internal and external), CSP specific transactions, and CSP system resource consumption. The previous common daily 8-5 operating windows with early morning and late afternoon activity peaks can be completely different with a WFH workforce.
4. More diligence should be placed on identifying suspicious content access
In a WFH environment the majority of your repository access is now from external network access. As a result, many remote work articles in recent days (such as here) have said:
- VPN access can vary with time of day network sensitivity
- Phishing email attempts will increase
- Self-service help desk chat bots are overloaded
- Employees may try different computing devices and house wifi locations, so they complete their work tasks for the day
The net result of using different devices and riding less secure home WIFI networks is an increased risk for user credential leakage. This leads to increased risk of content breaches from the possible reuse of compromised credentials.
You’re Not Alone, We’re Here to Support Your Work from Home Initiatives
Reveille Software have been providing solutions to monitor the performance of and access to content on your CSP long before this pandemic. We hear from CSP admins, managers, and business management searching for direct, simple solutions to reduce the daily CSP management burden. Our agentless solution can help you quickly gain insight that’s not included out-of-the-box and is both time-consuming and cumbersome to buildout with general purpose APM tools or fragmented in house scripting methods.
Our specialized monitoring of CSP applications goes well beyond general-purpose monitoring, providing context and detailed insight into the performance, adoption, planning, user behavior, security and audit of customer business-critical content stacks. Reveille integrates with CSP applications from IBM, OpenText, Kofax, Box and Microsoft to provide a real-time dashboard that actively displays the health of the user experience and application processes. It monitors each key component to proactively and automatically diagnose and repair the cause of a problem to improve end-user experience and ensure smoother operation of the business processes supported by your CSPs.
Contact us to discuss how we can help ensure your CSP applications run optimally and securely to support your current WFH initiatives and long-term business needs.
Stay safe and healthy,
Brian DeWyer, AIIM CIP
Reveille, CTO