Overview: BeyondTrust remote support

BeyondTrust remote support is a tool used by IT Services and other University IT Support Staff to help provide IT support. It allows you to temporarily share your screen with us so we can see what is going on. You can also give us temporary access to control your device to help carry out diagnostics or fix problems.

Personal or local devices: dissolvable agent

If you ask us to provide support for a device that you manage yourself, or that is managed by your department or college IT, then we may suggest using the BeyondTrust dissolvable agent to help. We will send you a link to download and open a small app that will connect us just for this support call and then be removed from your system. You can choose what level of access to grant us, but should only open these links if you are sure that you are dealing with University IT support staff in connection with a support call that you raised.

The agent generally works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and ChromeOS. Support for iOS, Android and ChromeOS is occasionally limited just after an OS upgrade.

Managed staff PCs: jump client

We install a BeyondTrust agent on all managed staff PCs. This is displayed as a red headphone icon in the system tray. The agent provides us with real-time information to help diagnose issues without needing to connect to your PC, and ensures that we can get a reliable connection under conditions when the dissolvable agent cannot work.

Please note that the red headphone icon may appear and disappear in the system tray from time-to-time. This is usually just the agent updating or Windows refreshing the system tray, and is not an indication that a connection is being used. If we do need to connect to your PC you will still be prompted to choose what level of access to grant us.

BeyondTrust Privileged Access Management (PAM)

In addition to the remote support tool, we use another BeyondTrust product to provide controlled access for approved third parties carrying out support work on our infrastructure systems. This is only relevant to IT support staff who have signed up to this service and granted specific access to their systems.