Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Another useful feature is to be able to set a restore point in Windows directly from the rep console. This basically ... this will be a feature in Bomgar™ as of the end of this month and it protects yourself from mistakes. The control-z button, or keystroke combination, for your session. So, if something goes wrong you can revert back to a previous setting and move on from there. Push URL is another useful feature to go ahead and navigate your customer directly to a needed URL without having to walk them through it.

Some security considerations, we believe that it's an absolute must to have the solution third party security audited. You need to be able to get from someone else's perspective whether or not the solution is secure. It needs to be using a strong encryption method and not give third party access to either the data or the data stream. Not even the vendor. Even the vendor needs to be excluded from that. You want a solution that does not increase the scope of your company's liability. So, for instance, using a hosted solution where you're routing company data through a third party, you're basically responsible for that data. You're responsible for how that third party uses that data. And, what that effectively does is expands the scope of your liability outside your walls, outside your control, but it is not outside your responsibility and your liability.

You want something that stores reporting data locally at your location. You want something that is server mediated where each session goes to the server and is not point-to-point. If you have a point to point solution where you just have a rep-client and then an end user-client that connects the two together, your ability to administer, to control, and to audit that solution goes way down because it means you're going to have to go from rep-console to rep-console figuring out what happened. You also want something that requires the end user give approval before remote control is initiated. It needs to be always off, on only by request. On only with the user request control or requests that ... requests support.