Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Bill Rose, SSPA:
The next slide focuses on how important it is for us to continue to deliver great service. I think it's pretty amazing to me that 80 percent or so of consumers these days are very much in tune with the kind of support that's provided, and it in fact is a major selection criteria.

Now, what's that mean for us? Well, the next slide focuses on new support challenges, because with all this complexity and all the things that are going on in our industry, there's some new and different things for us to be concerned about. One is the blurring of distinction between business use and personal use. It used to be that it was quite simple; if somebody was using a computer somewhere and they were a consumer, they were probably playing games, right? Not anymore. It's very difficult to determine the business side versus the personal side. There's an increased number of mobile workers and telecommuters. I mean, we're physically not in the same space anymore. I mean, a great example of this is this webcast here. Look how many of us are online - at least a few hundred of us online and all of us from different locations, right? And home broadband was less than 5 percent in 2000; today it's 30 percent, which means that your people could be anywhere, your customers could be anywhere, and that means that we have to support them anywhere.

So what are the implications for support? Well, let's go look at the next chart; maybe that'll help us understand what's going on here, right? One thing is that the support of the enterprise is no longer support of a centralized corporate office. So if you are doing any kind of support internal to your company, those people that used to be located in one particular place may be located anywhere. And consumers are more advanced - are using more advanced applications that demand much more than phone only support. So the more - one more time - the more complexity that we have within an environment, the more advanced those applications are, the harder they're going to be to support. And the greater need would be - for us would be to be able to reach in and take over, if you will, in order to make things happen.