Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Nathan McNeill, Bomgar™:
Let's take a couple of minutes to talk about how it works, just briefly. It all works through the appliance, and it's firewall transparent for both you and for your customer. So it works through any firewall or proxy or net or router without any pre-configuration. The way it would work is the support rep would monitor the queue waiting for incoming support requests, and then the customer would then initiate the session using one of three different initiation options. You can use a session key, you can use a display name or a support request form; and the administrator has the ability to decide which of those to display. You can also customize the support request form page to look - for the look and feel for your company.

And then once the customer grants control - and it always is granting control versus taking control. The rep is never going to reach out and take control of the system; the customer always has to explicitly grant permission to give control. And then once you have control of the system, the rep can troubleshoot just as if you were local to it. Amazingly more efficient than working through something over the phone, 'cause you're not trying to tell the customer to click here or click there; you can just do the service directly.

And then at the completion of the session, the customer would enter feedback about the session. A couple points here: The remote support - or the Bomgar™ client that was installed for the duration of the session while you are supporting the system is completely uninstalled at the end of the session, so there's no resident client on the PC. This has a couple of implications, one that Chuck alluded to earlier, which is simply privacy, that the user has control of their system, and they can control the session, who gets on, and then ensure that once the session is completed, the rep cannot gain control again until the customer explicitly grants permission again.