Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Bomgar™ offers a few things. One, is that we did have the entire solution, the appliance, and the software running on it audited by Symantec Corporation. They did a product penetration assessment on our product. It uses 256-bit AES/SSL encryption which is industry standard, actually a little bit above industry standard. We offer you the benefit of ownership which basically is that you can take the appliance, deploy it behind your existing security measures, within your compliance posture, and you are not exposed to any additional liability. And, it does require the end user give approval for each and every session.

Yes, let's see. This is the URL to the Symantec™ document. Some other considerations for security are: does it give the end user overriding control over their own mouse and keyboard? In other words, if the rep is moving the mouse and the customer wants to move the mouse, when the customer moves their mouse, does it take back control from the rep? We think that's really important because it keeps the customer in control of their own desktop.

The solution also needs to be zero footprint so you're not leaving software installed on the remote PC. It needs to integrate with LDAP. LDAP has security implications. We talked about it primarily from the standpoint of being able to create and administer users. But, it's also important from a security standpoint because, if you delete a user from LDAP, you want them automatically deleted from the appliance. You don't want to have to go back in and manually delete them from the appliance.

You also want granular authorization for each and every rep. So, being able to set that from a group level, group policy level, and also individually so you're not giving each rep just a basic set of privileges, you can administer that granularly to set different tiers so they don't have more access than is necessary. And, the solution needs to be easily auditable that any client side changes and any support rep activity is logged.