* The challenges of managing remote IT operations
According to Nemertes Building a Successful Virtual Workplace research, only about 18% of branch offices have IT staff on hand. The rest get support either from service providers, or more often from central IT staff.
The most expensive part of managing remote IT operations is dealing with the problems that central staff simply can’t resolve from a distance. The challenges can be both technological and human.
It might be, for example, that all the management tools IT has available to it require data network access, so that when the data network is down, remote access is impossible. Or, it might be that the problem requires powering down a component and then restarting it, which in-band management tools cannot do.
At a human level, it is sometimes possible to “remote control” a user on site, walking them through the diagnosis and resolution of a problem. This requires great patience and perseverance on both sides of the conversation, as well as a reasonably adept user on site, something that is not always available. It also, often, would require IT to set aside security policies in order to get a remote assistant logged in with admin access. Increasingly, this is seen not just as unwise but as insupportable, either simply because it is bad security practice, or because it requires clean-up, such as changing administrative passwords immediately after the resolution of the problem, or because it puts the enterprise out of compliance.
The expense comes both in time lost to the central staff while someone is in transit (anywhere from hours to days) and in time lost to the enterprise. The added time required to get someone on site is time when enterprise IT services are not available to some subset of users, and their productivity is decreased thereby.
From a troubleshooting perspective the ideal solution may be to put staff on site, but that is often simply insupportable from a staffing perspective – just too costly. A typical compromise is to outsource for hands-on-site. This only shifts the expenses around, and may only push the problem in another direction but not solve it: paying for staff on site permanently through an outsourcer is not much less expensive than having your own. If the outsourcer has to dispatch, then users are still offline for that time.
Another compromise solution is to use specialized management tools in remote facilities. If the remote facility can be reached by means other than the main data connection, central staff can still work through connectivity problems. If the management tools can not just look at, but touch systems – handle low-level issues like cycling power, whether via management cards, console access, or smart power strips – so much the better . More problems will be resolved without rolling a truck.
Use of such tools, though, raises the bar for security. They provide both a separate entrance and deep access to the infrastructure, so they must be even more secure than the systems they manage.
As the enterprise continues to spread into more, and more widely distributed, branches, it will create more, and more urgent, demands for such tools, to make fully or partially centralized IT more practical. If service providers also use them, it will make the outsourced option more attractive and viable too.
