Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with
Appliance-Based Remote Support

Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
There were also security concerns. Encryption was not easily enforced on pcAnywhere and customers would set up passwords but there wasn't any kind of a strong password management or requirements on their end. So, this left them vulnerable to attack, especially over the internet. And then finally, there were versioning conflicts. pcAnywhere would update their software - upgrade the software every year and, with newer versions, there were version incompatibilities as customers would have a newer version than we would or we would have a newer version than our customers would.

There are other ways that we connected as well. Some of our customers required that we connect to them via Citrix or RDP. And then, what really tipped us off, or what really got us into trouble, were VPNs. And, that was the most frustrating part of remote control connection. The VPNs in 2005 were really flooding our customers. They were installing them primarily as a result of HIPAA security requirements that were - the regulations that were published in 2005. And so, as each of our customers started choosing different VPN methods and VPN products, we would have to constantly install these clients on different PCs within our office. And, if you've had any experience with different VPN clients, they don't work very well together on one computer. So, this presented a technical challenge.

Secondly, the challenge of even installing these VPNs – VPN clients on software. Typically that would require a member of my own IT staff as well as a customer's IT staff or consultant. And then, the technical support rep is trying to connect to that computer. There was lots of time that was wasted on this as well as – and then there was also training. We would have to train our reps on how to use the different clients. So, things were getting pretty frustrating around here and our customers were also frustrated because we couldn't connect very quickly to their systems.