About Remote Support Solutions

More and more organizations are conducting business on a global scale, setting up branch and virtual offices at various locations around the world. As a result, IT infrastructures have become increasingly disparate, making it more difficult than ever to control, monitor, and administrate them. Additionally, IT staff members are busier than ever before – fielding an average of over 100 calls per week, according to industry research reports.

Many companies have begun to utilize remote support solutions as a means of more effectively managing their worldwide IT operations. With remote support solutions, IT staff can dynamically monitor, manage, troubleshoot, and repair any system, anywhere in the world, without ever leaving their office.

What are Remote Support Solutions?

Remote support solutions provide a suite of advanced technology tools that enable the identification and resolution of technical issues with desktop computers, applications, hardware, and other enterprise systems from off-site locations. IT staff members can dynamically connect to any component in the environment, from anywhere in the world, to perform diagnostics, check the status of monitoring software, initiate re-boots, transfer patches and other files, and much more.

Key Benefits of Remote Support Solutions for Your Company

A remote support solution offers significant advantages to companies of all types and sizes, such as:

• Improved business continuity. With remote support solutions, the technical issues that can negatively impact productivity can be detected and fixed immediately, before they disrupt business vital operations.
• Accelerated resolution time. Remote support solutions significantly increase the speed of problem resolution. This benefit is particularly important for companies that use remote support software to provide technical service to clients.
• Reduced expenses. Remote support solutions dramatically decrease IT support-related costs by eliminating the expenses associated with system downtime, as well as the need for IT staff to travel to branch offices to perform maintenance and upgrades, and address technical problems.
• Increased IT efficiency. In most organizations today, IT departments face huge resource constraints. With limited staff, they must juggle multiple critical corporate technology initiatives such as the implementation and roll out of new solutions, while providing rapid support to end users for existing applications. Remote support solutions allow these IT professionals to work more productively, so they can be as responsive to end users as possible, without diverting their attention away from other important projects.

Does My Company Need Remote Support Solutions?

Without remote support solutions in place, effectively managing and maintaining geographically dispersed IT operations can be quite challenging. Costs will be too high, and already strained resources will be further overburdened. Additionally, the time to troubleshoot and correct problems will be longer than ideal, particularly if issues occur with mission-critical systems, resulting in loss of end user productivity and compromised architecture and application performance.

If your organization is in the technology industry and provides software, hardware, or services, remote support solutions can be used to help improve the timeliness and quality of customer service, boost responsiveness and first call resolution rates, and minimize related costs.

Common Features of Remote Support Solutions

There are many remote support solutions available, and most of them include the following functions and capabilities:

• Automatic system information gathering, so IT staff can instantly obtain user profiles, hardware specs, versions of installed applications, and other important information.
• Real-time monitoring of all remote system activity.
• The ability to fully operate any off-site PC from any where in the world, including the keyboard and mouse.
• Rapid communication between IT staff and end users via Web conferencing, video conferencing, voice chat, or IM.
• Upload and download facilities that allow IT staff and users to share files.
• Advanced security features, such as encryption, permission-based authorizations before a user takes control of a remote system, unique session logins, and automatic session recording, to keep all connections fully protected at all times.

What to Look for When Choosing Remote Support Solutions

• While many remote support solutions on the market today contain similar features and functions, there are a few characteristics that make the world-class packages stand out among the others. Be sure to look for a solution with the following:
• The ability to customize your IT help desk management solution is vital because technology architectures, employee needs, IT department structures, common issues, and support procedures vary greatly from company to company. The solution you choose must be flexible enough to conform to – or even improve upon – your existing processes, and should not force you to re-vamp or tailor those processes to fit the way the solution works.
• Immediate connection to system components, including end user PCs that are behind firewalls, routers, or other network address translation devices, to accelerate resolution time and prevent delays that can hinder core activities.
• Rapid file transfer, without slowing down network performance. In many cases, patches and other large files will need to be sent from remote locations. Choose a solution that includes mechanisms to minimize the impact of these transfers on the technology environment.
• Cross platform support, so any system across the enterprise can be easily managed and maintained.
• Persistent connections, so remote troubleshooting and resolution sessions are not dropped or interrupted while they are still in progress.