When supporting remote teams, are RMMs really the best fit?

Working from home has changed the way IT works. It’s time your tools changed to match.

Home internet is now office internet.

This is a sentiment we’ve been hearing from more and more IT professionals as working-from-home companies continue, well, working from home.

In fact, a recent poll suggested a ludicrous 91% of organizations are now supporting working from home. Not only is it a fundamental shift in the daily operations of a business, but a complete departure from how an IT department typically supports its users.

While many orgs are still coming to grips with the fact that WFH is here to stay, so, too, are IT teams coming to grips with the simple fact that their current toolset just isn’t the right fit for their needs.

Specifically, the sorts of remote monitoring and management suites many might turn to aren’t really built with distributed employees, home networks, and bring-your-own-device policies in mind. And while some RMMs have made adjustments to accommodate the newer normal, they don’t always provide the level of granularity and speed demanded by more, ahem, passionate high-value individuals.

This is where PingPlotter Cloud comes in. Faster, simpler and privacy-friendly, it collects network performance data between the device and any target in real-time. And when it comes to supporting a distributed workforce, there really isn’t a better value.

See the network the way they see it

Right now, network visibility is often the most important issue for remote IT. Yes, hardware and setup are important for any WFH office, but those are the types of things most departments have already tackled. Network issues, however, are an ever-present complication that frustrates and impedes employees day after day.

Most RMMs, while providing some network visibility from the endpoint perspective, are often more focused on hardware. This is because, traditionally, RMMs are deployed on mission-critical devices like servers where hardware failure is a more relevant issue (often due to cost, which we’ll get to later).

Cloud is all about the network.

PingPlotter Cloud is focused on foundational network performance metrics, enabling you to collect up-to-the-second performance data to get the clearest snapshot of any remote connection. By using lightweight agents, Cloud can collect network data like latency, packet loss, jitter, and more from the perspective of the laptop or workstation having issues.

Cloud can also help you dig into data to find patterns and problems larger products might miss due to slower polling rates. Where many RMMs are testing connections once a minute, PingPlotter can test multiple connections once every second without a negative impact on the device or the network.

When it comes to testing a network, it’s hard to compare to the speed and precision of PingPlotter Cloud.

A tool that puts you at the center

Traditional RMMs are tailored to massive deployments. That's helpful for large IT teams with lots of endpoints and customers to manage, but it's often too much for small and mid-sized teams.

Cloud’s flexibility and versatility make it a more accessible option for remote organizations of all sizes.

PingPlotter Cloud plans are based around general usage, not user counts, devices, or data limits. Our scalable packages are based around active network traces, so you can easily deploy agents to every workstation in use and monitor connections as needed.

That flexibility also extends to your workflow. Cloud is focused on collecting critical performance metrics without trapping you in a larger SaaS ecosystem. REST API support and script-friendly alerts mean Cloud is set and ready to play nice with your current tools.

Also, it doesn't hurt that our solution easily costs 10x less than its nearest RMM competitors, making it great not just for smaller teams, but for schools, nonprofits, and other organizations where every penny counts.

Trust matters

Supporting a remote workforce is more than just wrangling devices — it's also about managing people. It can be exhausting having to prove that you and your team are maintaining a high level of service.

Cloud features live, read-only views that you can share with stakeholders and executives that KPIs are being met, whether they're internal metrics or for an SLA. It can also help reassure the more privacy-conscious (or employees using their own devices) that your focus remains on their network's performance.

Cloud also doesn’t support unnecessary back doors into the devices you monitor. When you start a network test, all that anyone sees are the results. Support teams can spot issues the moment they appear while normal network traffic stays protected.

Take the power back

When they make sense, RMMs are a critical tool for keeping an organization up and running. Unfortunately, in the new WFH world, what used to make sense has changed.

Tightening budgets, an increase in distributed devices, and barely-controllable home networks have complicated the daily operations of IT departments worldwide. A tool like PingPlotter Cloud makes all of these complications just a bit easier to manage.

For some, Cloud is the solution they’ve always wanted. For everyone else, it’s the perfect solution for right now.

And “right now” is looking like it’s gonna be a while.