Hi everyone, how’s it going?

I’d love to get your perspective on this situation:

I’m the sole guy responsible for IT operations and infrastructure for my country at the company where I work. The company was recently "sold"/migrated to another group within the same conglomerate. I used to report to a highly structured global IT team (80% cloud, very mature processes), but with this transition, an entirely new leadership team took over. The new CTO recently came here to establish the new headquarters in another city.

We are currently in a transition phase, still using a few things from the old infrastructure (Entra ID, Intune, and... our remote access tool). However, the IT team from the old group won't allow us to add any new machines to this access tool during the migration. To make things more interesting, the CTO’s first big mandate upon arriving here was: replace everyone's laptops.

Realizing that I would completely lose the ability to support these new machines, I asked the CTO which global remote access solution they use so I could migrate the machines, or if we should procure a standalone solution just for my country. His answer: "We don't need any."

I didn't understand and pressed the matter. I explained that we operate on a hybrid model, users are scattered, and now that the new HQ is active, I’m being flooded with support tickets from people in another city with these new laptops, where I have zero visibility. He insisted: "No need. You can just guide the user over a video call. It is a global decision not to use remote access tools."

Since he is the CTO and we speak in English with each other (which is not the native language for either of us) I decided not to keep bumping heads.

But the tickets keep coming. Trying to troubleshoot blindly is an absolute hell. Out of desperation, I did my homework: I gathered a few local quotes from standard market remote access tool vendors and presented the pricing to him, showing how users were reaching out to me and why we needed this. He replied again: "We are not going to use remote access."

I simply gave up. I'm not going to keep bumping heads with the CTO. It’s clearly not a budget issue, it feels more like a rigid and inflexible mindset. He never gave me the real "why" behind this rule. At first, I thought maybe it was some extreme, distorted Zero Trust policy or user data privacy thing. But then, a few days later, I asked this same CTO which corporate antivirus solution we were going to deploy, since we are going to stop using the one from the previous group. His response: "We don't need antivirus because we use MacBooks."

At that point, my friends, I decided to just "let it go" and strictly follow his orders. I brought the issues to the highest technical authority in my sector, and he refused to act. If a key user has to spend 4 hours on a video call with me trying to fix a stupid issue that I could solve in 30 seconds via terminal, so be it.

Has anyone here ever dealt with such an inflexible leadership? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this "behavior", your experiences, and what kind of workarounds you’ve used in similar situations.

Thanks!