Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Bill Rose, SSPA:
Well, we think we got it figured out and you're moving your arrow there to the right, and then we go to our next slide and we realize that as you move your arrow to the right, your customer's perceptions are moving to the right as well. So we have to constantly be evolving our technical support and delivering mechanisms in order to become, and maintain our effectiveness.

Let's look at the requirements for effective remote support. There's some technical requirements and there's support requirements. I think from a technical standpoint, technical access to the customer information is important, support team access to service provider information is key, and protecting company information is really what we're talking about today. From support requirements, we definitely can lower our costs, right? We can shorten response times, and we have this flexibility that I think is really important to us because we can reach out and have a lot of different people from a lot of different areas.

So with that, let me just - here's a quote that I think is pretty interesting from Matt at IDC, and basically, you can read this. "Remote support tools are essential part of a company's IT support strategy; however, customers need to consider the security implications of these tools before choosing a remote support solution. So here's an industry analyst warning customers to be concerned about security. And that's why we want to talk more about this, and we want to try to figure out what's happening.

Well, the next slide just kind of sums it all up. The problem is if you're going to deliver remote support, for excellent support it's great, right? But access is required; and if you have access, then you have issues. And so security issues are going to make this extremely difficult.

So with that said, let me introduce Chuck from Humana and have Chuck maybe tell us a little bit about how Humana handles these issues, how big the security risk is, and how does remote support really help with that. Chuck?