Capacity: While the physical B300 can handle up to 300 concurrent support reps, capacity for the virtual appliance is determined by your Virtual Infrastructure.

Redundancy: The same is true for ensuring a redundant environment. The physical appliance offers the following for redundancy:

• Dual processors
• Dual power supplies
• RAID 5 - three hard drives and one hot spare
• Hard drive failure notification
• Secondary B300 failover configuration

On the other hand, you can leverage your current virtual infrastructure to configure the virtual appliance for high availability.

Organizations with virtual initiatives already under way will find in the B300v a way to deploy Bomgar in their environment without adding another box.

Using VMware ESX, deploy the B300v™ as any other virtual appliance into your environment. Once installed, administrators have all the options a physical Bomgar B300™ provides for setting up security providers, ticketing integration, and virtual support teams.

We’ve had numerous discussions here at Bomgar around how best to visualize the B300v Virtual Appliance. What we’ve narrowed it down to is a minimalistic line drawing of the physical B300.

What do you think? Is this the best solution? I’d like to get our readers’ feedback on our image for the B300v.

Bomgar will be attending this year’s HDI (Help Desk Institute) Service Management Conference in Miami, FL. More than 500 attendees are expected at the conference, which takes place October 15-16, 2008. This is HDI’s newest event which focuses on key topics in service management. To learn more about this event, click on the link http://www.thinkhdi.com/sm2008/. Check back soon for updates from HDI SM 2008!

Date: Thursday, October 16, 2008
Time: 11 am PDT; 2 pm EDT; 6 pm GST
Duration: 1 Hour

Security frameworks such as COBIT, COSO, ISO and NERC are becoming increasingly common – yet, according to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), none of these is adopted by more than 30% of enterprises worldwide.

So what have enterprises adopted? EMA found that of 19 frameworks, standards or best practices for risk and compliance management including those already mentioned, only ITIL was adopted by a majority of enterprises (55%).

ITIL? Isn’t ITIL designed for productivity and process efficiency? Or could it be that security and productivity are friends?

Come join Scott Crawford with EMA, BMC’s Doug Bagley and Nathan McNeill with Bomgar Corporation to learn:

• Why a concern for the bottom line improves security
• Why the highest performers in IT risk management follow ITIL principles
• Why 59% of organizations who experiencing a data security breach (according to a recent Verizon Business study ) had a security policy, but never put it into practice.
• How increasing support efficiency with virtual support can create an audit trail as a byproduct
• How key enablers of IT security and risk management fall directly within ITIL

EMA research director Scott Crawford, Bomgar co-founder and vice presidentof product strategy Nathan McNeill, and BMC solutions architect Doug Bagley will explain how to apply ITIL to security and risk management initiatives.They will cover the gaps in IT management disciplines that plague security,what ITIL is and why so many are adopting it and how ITIL best practices improve security.

Join Our Webinar: Applying ITIL to Security and Risk Management

Date: Thursday, October 16, 2008
Time: 11 am PDT; 2 pm EDT; 6 pm GST
Duration: 1 Hour

A Bomgar sales engineer gives a brief overview of Bomgar and demonstrates how to install the support representative console.

Bomgar’s rep console gives virtual support reps a clean, easy-to-use interface for supporting remote computers. This video is an introduction to the rep console.

This video demonstrates how to use the Bomgar toolbar during a remote support session.

This video how to use the tabs in Bomgar’s rep console during a remote support session.

Bomgar enables virtual support reps to escalate privileges on remote computers to administrative privileges. This Video demonstrates the same run-as-administrator capabilities on Vista.

Remote support reps often need to reboot the remote computer they’re troubleshooting. Bomgar gives support reps the ability to reboot the remote computer into Safe Mode.

Bomgar bakes unlimited remote access into its core product. This video shows how to gain virtual access to remote computers using Bomgar’s Jump Technology.

Bomgar enables support reps to collaborate during support sessions. Tech support reps can invite other technicians to chat or share support sessions.

With Bomgar, administrators or team leaders can oversee the activities of their help desk or service desk. Bomgar’s Administrative Dashboard lets managers view support reps’ open sessions or complete desktop. Administrators can also take over or transfer support sessions.

Bomgar lets support reps push a URL to remote customers. Bomgar also gives support organizations granular control over file transfer. Bomgar automatically logs all session data, including what files are transferred.

Bomgar has basic online presentation and screen sharing built into its core software. Give an online presentation to multiple online attendees.

Hoover cites several recent outages which are “forcing customers to rethink their dependency on software as a service and other cloud services, and devise strategies for the inevitable breakdowns”:

Last week, Google’s Gmail went down for two hours [August 6th and 11th], the second time in two weeks. Citrix’s GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar were temporarily unavailable [August 7th]. A month ago, Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service was out of commission for an excruciating eight hours [July 20th].

As options for protecting yourself from SaaS failures, Hoover suggests

• “storing data with multiple service providers”
• “regularly backing up SaaS data on on-premises servers”
• avoiding cloud computing providers who are startups, and
• ensuring your SLAs have fangs.

But the reality is that servers are going to crash. Whether they’re on-premise or in a cloud somewhere, they’re going to fail at some point. The problem is not necessarily that they do, but how easy it is to maintain continuity during and rebound from the failure. Does your data vaporize when the cloud vaporizes?

When a server is on site, a good IT department will have its data and applications backed up on one or more other servers. Hardware virtualization is making this easier by allowing organizations to configure critical applications for high availability. Hardware failures can in many cases be handled with little-to-no repercussions visible to the end user.

This is ostensibly the benefit of using a service. The service provider promises to store your data and run your application for you. You don’t even have to have an IT department [no one believes this part]. The service provider can virtualize its hardware and promise you high availability.

However, backing up the applications and data on one server in your own rack with another server that is also in your own rack is one thing. Backing up the data and applications in someone else’s cloud with the same ease and integrity is another.

Hoover says it might be a good idea to “limit your dependency on cloud services for business-critical processes.” Not a bad suggestion considering the nascent stages of the industry and recent failures by solid, reputable corporations. Quoting Russ Daniels, VP and CTO of Hewlett-Packard’s cloud services business,

You need to be thoughtful about how use you use cloud resources, so that the things you do have lower risk. [. . .] Be thoughtful about where this stuff sits, rather than imagining that your existing systems will be replaced by stuff in the cloud and it will all be OK.

Our philological prejudice against thinking of clouds as secure is probably good — a fair warning about building anything absolutely essential in them . . . or at least in the clouds that aren’t ours.

Incidentally, if you’d like to receive alerts whenever we release a software update, you should grab the feed from http://www.bomgar.com/upgrade/changelog/index.php/feed/atom/. Feedburner’s a good service for that, or you can set up your mail client to receive RSS.

New Features and Enhancements:

• Administrative and Management Features:
  • Physical Appliance Redundancy and Failover*
  • Bomgar Box Software Update Manager (Check for Update)
  • Representative Dashboard and Representative Monitor*
    • Dashboard Overview of Teams, Sessions, and Jump Clients
    • Silent Monitor of Representative’s Desktops
  • Team License Reservation*
  • Presentation Recording
  • Reporting Enhancements:
    • Presentation Reporting
    • Team Event Reporting*
  • True Time Zone Support in the Administrative and Systems Interfaces
• Enhanced Security Functionality*:
  • Kerberos Single Sign-on
  • Enhanced Smart Card/Multi-factor Authentication Support via Kerberos
• General Features:
  • Privacy Screen
  • File Transfer Enhancements:
    • Time Stamp Preservation Option
    • In-progress Notification to Customers
    • Configurable Transfer Direction Limitations
    • Configurable Local and Remote Path Limitations
  • Remote Command Prompt Enhancements
    • Windows Remote Command Prompt improvements
    • Remote Command Prompt now Supports Multi-language
  • Reboot/Reconnect Enhancements:
    • Auto-login Capability in Reboot/reconnect
    • Auto-login Capability in Reboot/reconnect into Safe Mode
• Platform Support Enhancements:
  • Mac
    • Representative Client
    • Presentations (Presenting as well as attending)
    • Show My Screen (This feature currently only supports view-only. The “Enable Control” button has been disabled)
    • Virtual Pointer
    • Clipboard Support (i.e. Copy and Paste capability)
  • Linux
    • Show My Screen (This feature currently only supports view-only. “Enable Control” button on rep has been disabled)
    • Virtual Pointer
    • Clipboard Support (i.e. Copy and Paste capability)
• Jump Technology Functionality Enhancements:
  • Customizable Text Field for Jump Clients
  • Additional Permissions Around Jump Client Use
  • Configurable Set of Update Statistics options for Jump Clients
• Bomgar Peripheral and Integration Applications:
  • Bomgar Integration Client (with archival Plug-ins)
  • Bomgar Integration Client Plug-In SDK

In his post, Is your remote control security bullet-proof?, Ragsdale summarizes a recent webcast minicast covering the topic. The format is an “open discussion on security and compliance with Phil Smiley, Director of IT Security for SSPA member BMC Software, Phil Demuth, VP of Internal Systems for ITI Fiserv,” and our own Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy.

Here’s Ragsdale’s 30,000 foot summary:

• Use a ‘best of breed’ remote control product with strong security features.
• Leverage the product’s audit trail to capture every action of the agent.
• Enable tracking of uploads/downloads to/from customer systems.
• Prompt customers to approve uploads/downloads during the session.

The webcast is available free here:
Risky Business – Is Your Support Center Introducing New Risks into Your Business?

Pomeroy’s presentation: Screenshot from the webinar
Reducing Customer Support Costs and Improving Service Quality with Remote Support

Summary of Remote Support Webcast

IT service and support leaders are under more pressure than ever before to tighten expenses, budgets and people. At the same time, service quality commitments are becoming the norm. A secret weapon that many organizations have today, but are not using to its fullest potential, is remote support. With the right remote support solution in place, you should reduce support costs by:

1. Improving the efficiency of your support team by eliminating costly on-site dispatches and reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
2. Gain respect for the IT support team by delivering on committed service level agreements (SLAs)
3. Consolidating the myriad of tools within your enterprise to one solution that can reach any both attended and unattended systems

Hear how remote support has a direct impact on support cost structure and perceptions around IT service quality in the enterprise. This presentation will focus on results achieved by customers in their environments and illustrate the relationship between service quality, cost control, and the customer experience.

• Lisa Erickson-Harris, EMA analyst
• Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions
• Chris Watson, VP Strategic Alliances, Bomgar

This presentation began on April 03, 2008 at 01:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

You may join the live event or watch it on-demand later.

Novell’s new Volume License Agreement (VLA) maintenance program offers technical assistance and product support to Novell’s customers. I’m interested in the program because of the thoughtfulness behind their integration of virtual support for customers.

Novell has posted an online demo of the support request process at http://support.novell.com/online/demo.html. The demo is only a few minutes long. It’s definitely worth taking the time to view, especially if you’re wonder how best to to funnel support requests and move customers through the support process.

I’m repeatedly impressed by our customers. This is just another example. Thank you, Novell, for publishing such a well-planned example of integrating virtual support.