The IT service desk department is tasked with troubleshooting a wide range of technical issues, such as malfunctioning devices, apps that crash, and installations that fail, to name just a few.

Onsite visits, one of the traditional IT troubleshooting methods for devices (offline or online), is no longer an option for many organizations due to the pandemic. Of course, onsite visits had their problems even before the coronavirus—they could be both time-consuming and costly for an organization. The productivity of your IT department is only as good as the resources they have to use each day and the ability to support multiple platforms and devices—on or off your network.

With all that said, BeyondTrust is pleased to announce the availability of version 21.1 of our leading Remote Support solution. This new version introduces functionalities that allow unattended and attended support for additional devices, including for Zebra devices and Raspberry Pi OS, as well as Jump Client-based discovery for Windows devices. These capabilities allow users to maintain, control, and manage their devices using the power of digital technology and computing. The BeyondTrust solution enables service desk teams to gain visibility into the status and performance of these devices with real-time insights about the health of the equipment, and to remotely fix issues as if they had the device in their hands.

In this release customers will also benefit from additional enhancements to our credentials Vault, including the ability to create personal accounts, as well as extending discovery and rotation in the Vault.

Below is a brief round-up of what is new with the release of version 21.1. For more information, you can also check out the release notes.

Jump Client Discovery & Rotation

Jump Clients can now perform discovery and rotation of local credentials (Windows only). This new functionality allows administrators to manage machines individually and set who has access to those machines, without the need to set up a local or shared account on the remote system. This feature complements the use of Jump Points in the network for domain-based rotation, while also allowing for more granular control over smaller groups of machines.

Raspberry Pi OS Support

BeyondTrust’s Secure Remote Access Jump Client Technology has added headless support for the Raspberry Pi OS. Thanks to its low power requirements and high processing capabilities, Raspberry Pi is often leveraged for specialized use cases, such as for equipment or machine monitoring of industrial applications, or even as an edge gateway solution. However, these devices need to be secured, maintained, and optimized, just like any other device.

BeyondTrust Remote Support enables Raspberry Pi secure access. This allowed privileged users to connect to more types of unattended systems, perform administrative actions, and secure who has access to manage these devices.

Zebra Device Support

Zebra devices are constantly on the move, or situated in remote locations, but are critical to empowering employee productivity. The process of supporting these devices—ensuring proper configurations, and effectiveness—has traditionally been time-consuming for help desks, as well as expensive and error-prone. BeyondTrust’s integration with Zebra Technologies gives IT service desk reps the power to access (either attended or unattended), troubleshot, and support Zebra devices to help minimize any potential down time.

BeyondTrust Vault

Included with Remote Support at no additional cost, the BeyondTrust Vault protects privileged credentials with discovery, management, rotation, auditing, and monitoring for any privileged account — from local or domain shared administrator, to a user’s personal admin account, even SSH keys, cloud and social media accounts.

Vault Link in Representative Console

The Desktop and Web Representative Consoles now include a top-level menu item labeled “Vault”, which has a link to the Vault interface in /login. This link enables users in each console to easily access Vault to check in or check out credentials when necessary, either during a session or on the user’s local machine.

Account Groups

Vault administrators can now organize Vault accounts into account groups, providing a better management experience. Admins can now assign account groups to group policies, rather than only individual Vault accounts. Additionally, Vault accounts can be assigned to an account group during the import process.

Personal Accounts

Remote Support users now have the ability to create private generic accounts in Vault. This functionality helps improve the productivity of users by allowing them to manage their own Vault accounts privately for use during remote sessions, or for quick access to other tools. Users can store Generic Credentials that are not managed, rotated, or visible to anyone else but themselves. These credentials are then useable for injection or check out by that user only.

Reporting

Vault reporting now provides more search options and the ability to directly download the report results. The reporting API has been updated to support this new functionality.

Assign Public Portals to Support Teams

BeyondTrust Remote Support allows you to create internal or external-facing web portals, or public-facing web sites. These portals allow your customers or employees to request support. Each portal can be configured with the organization’s branding and support processes. This includes customizing logos and allowing customers to start a BeyondTrust session using click-to-chat.

In this release, admins can now restrict what portals are used by a support team. This new functionality will create more granular control on how a team interacts with the sites.

Extended ADPU Smart Card Support Option

During a support session, a support representative may need to operate with administrative rights to effectively troubleshoot the remote computer. Within environments where security implementations require smart card use for authentication, BeyondTrust enables the support representative to pass administrative credentials to the remote computer from a smart card resident on the rep’s local system.

In this release, we have updated the Virtual Smart Card feature to support Extended APDU.

Taking Your Service Desk to the Next Level with BeyondTrust Remote Support

BeyondTrust Remote Support enables help desk teams to rapidly and securely access and troubleshoot any remote device, across any platform, located anywhere in the world—all via a single solution. The new features in version 20.1 expand what’s already possible with our solution, helping you empower, protect, and scale your service desk.

If you are already a customer, here’s how to get started with version 21.1: https://www.beyondtrust.com/docs/remote-support/getting-started/deployment/web/support-updates.htm