Third-Party Risk Management: Secure and time-limited remote access for contractor and vendors
 

Third-Party Risk Management: Secure and time-limited remote access for contractors and vendors

Temporary workers only need time-limited access. It seems obvious, yet only a few remote access solutions are designed to accommodate this fact. Thinfinity Remote Workspace, with its powerful scheduling solution, ensures that users not only receive access to the resources they need but also for the exact time frame they need them.

How does your business handle remote access for external contractors? That’s a question many are asking today as companies are relying more and more on contract workers, third-party vendors, and international staff augmentation strategies. 

Multiple reasons support this growing trend:

  • The prevalence of acute labor shortages in many countries that are restricting companies from hiring enough workers.
  • Vendors rely more on their dedicated installation teams to deploy complex product solutions as internal IT teams lack the necessary time or expertise.
  • Temporary increased labor capacities to fulfill sudden workloads spike or accelerate project timetables. 
  • Non-permanent employees are hired to bridge capacity until a permanent team is in place.
  • Contracting outside personnel with specialized skill sets for a specific project or time frame.

This increasing reliance on an external workforce presents a real challenge for businesses and organizations to allot remote access to resources they need and when they need them.

Temporary Work Means Temporary Access

Temporary workers only need temporary access. It seems obvious, yet only a few remote access solutions are designed to accommodate this fact. Organizations that still rely on legacy VPN solutions can relate to this hypothesis by gazing at their list of VPN-enabled user accounts. Some of these accounts used by outside vendors and contract workers are rarely active, while others are only utilized for limited time windows.

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Because these types of remote user accounts are seldom used, each represents a vulnerability. That’s because while full-time employees can police their accounts and know if they have been compromised, underutilized remote user accounts can be seized by external threat actors who can then use them unabated for extended periods.

Hardening Your Remote Access Attack Surface

We all know the importance of reducing the attack surface of servers. This is achieved by uninstalling unused applications, disabling unnecessary services, and closing open ports that aren’t required. The fact is that the attack surface of your remote access system needs to be hardened as well. Unfortunately, simply disabling these user accounts means more work for your IT team that must constantly enable and disable them according to the usage schedule. 

Fortunately, Thinfinity provides a simple solution that solves the inherent security challenge of granting remote access to contract workers, proving simple and effective.

 

Schedule Access for Contractors When They Need It

For years now, Thinfinity has been creating solutions to serve today’s needs for the hybrid workforce. Thinfinity Remote Access solutions have always been well suited for contract workers and other third-party users because they don’t require any particular client application, agent, or hardware. 

External users only need a simple web browser on any smartphone or internet-connected device to access the resources they need to perform their contracted work. 

Thinfinity has now taken this one step further by integrating Thinfinity Remote Workspace with a built-in scheduler app that lets you restrict resource availability to specified time slots. This means that external workers get scheduled access only when needed.

 

Let Contract Workers Book Their Time Slots

Perhaps you have a contracted specialist that performs tasks within your on-prem environment every weekend. Simply schedule an access window for them every weekend, set it up recurrently, and you’re done. 

Third parties that either perform a one-time job function or work a varying schedule can book a scheduled time themselves. Using a calendar view, they can choose the date and time that works for them, select from a list of available resources and edit or cancel existing bookings. Internal personnel can quickly scan a calendar to view the complete list of upcoming bookings. Once a remote session is ended, the access is revoked and is only made available if another session is scheduled once again. 

 

Integrates with Your Existing Environment

Thinfinity® Workspace is a turnkey solution that gives remote users a local-like experience that delivers business-critical apps and files from a single web portal.  It doesn’t require the installation of any dedicated hardware and integrates seamlessly with your existing identity provider of choice: 

  • Thinfinity® Workspace’s booking capabilities can be configured with existing AzureAD or legacy Active Directory and AWS or Okta. 
  • Conveniently add, remove and manage resource booking permissions by group instead of adding one user at a time. 
  • Increase security by integrating any existing SSO solution such as ask Duo, PingID, Auth0, Radius, or SAML (and many others).

 

Conclusion

ATemporary work aligns with temporary access, which is what Thinfinity® Workspace delivers with its powerful booking solution that ensures that users receive the level of access they need and only grant it for the exact time they need it. If you want just-in-time remote access for your remote users, contact us at Thinfinity for more information and a free trial to witness this empowering feature for yourself.

If you found this article interesting and want to know more about Thinfinity® Workspace, you can contact us or schedule a 15-minute demo call with one of our Sales Engineers.

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