Two Waves of Support: Balancing Security & Mobility

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management:
So, that was a brief little introduction. I wanted to walk through just kind of a real brief history of kind of where support has come and the environments support has had to deal with over the last 15 years or so.

Fifteen years ago you had, basically, a LAN infrastructure. You had Ethernet was very prevalent but not Internet. So, you normally had your users in a cube form where you were supporting the guy down the hall. Usually fairly centralized, not a lot of dispersed users. And then, one other thing about that is you had virtually zero laptops. If you look at pictures of laptops from 15 years ago you can barely lug them around. And, one thing about this Ethernet environment that support was dealing with 15 years ago is that you had the first kind of remote control products and support tools, but they were made to function within a LAN, within a local area network, without firewall or proxy or router issues in between. And then, from that, you had kind of a LAN/WAN infrastructure that evolved where you had more and more parts of a campus or different business units that were connected by a BVPN or other type of link. So, the complexity increased but the structure remained fairly much the same where you had a fairly single network, same IP address scheme, and you weren't dealing with firewall issues between different computers on this network. And so, the same remote control products that worked for the LAN infrastructure tended to work for the LAN/WAN infrastructure as well.

At this point too, you know, 1995 time frame, the internet was just getting started. So, and then, broadband was non-existent. If you had internet, it was dial up. You may have had high-speed connection within two computers on network, but internet connectivity was very slow by and large. And then, home PCs tended to be pretty much isolated on their own little islands and they may have a dial up connection, they may not. And, support for those PCs was not really too much of an issue.