Support and Maintenance Remote Access

The cost of support and maintaining large, complex IT infrastructures, on a twenty four by seven basis has made outsourcing a commercial necessity. Telcoms organisations, oil and gas producers, global financial and media organisations all rely on IT to run their businesses and more importantly to delivery real time digital services to their customers and partners. Underneath the covers these services are made up of an integration of data hosting, network delivery, customer management, billing, service management and provisioning, and operational management capabilities. Having the skills under one roof to support and maintain such a diverse set of capabilities, often made up of a multitude of technolgies and platforms from different vendors, is unrealistic.

Outsourcing allows organisations to delegate responsibility for the support and maintenance of key components of it IT infrastructre to firms specialising in that particular area. For example it makes significant sense to outsource the management of network elements and billing platforms to the vendors who produce them.

While the commercial pressures dictate an outsourcing path, there are a number of operational, legal and fiduciary barriers that have addressed before outsourcing becomes a cost effective reality.

 3rd Party Access to IT Resources



 Separation and control of access to customer and organisation data

   Compliance with regulations
 

From an organisation’s perspective, these are difficult issues to address. From and administration and cost perspective, a single solution which can be applied across all outsource partners, support and maintenance access protocols, and IT platforms is highly desirable.

Open4:Access provides a centralised support and maintenance remote access management capability enabling highly granular and time based controls to be placed on third party access. Full visibility and tracability of access is provided through administration interfaces and audit services.

How do 3rd party engineers access internal IT platforms for support and maintenance purposes? On-site access is becoming an increasingly costly option. Many support and maintenance tasks can be performed remotely,however, this requires strong security and account management capabilities. To be cost effective these need to be applicable to all 3rd party organisations.

Different IT platforms will have different access requirements dependent upon the data they hold and the operational role they perform. Access in these cases may have to be closely monitored, requiring explicit approval of sessions from identified roles within the organisation.

The increasing burden of regularity regiemes such as Sarbanes Oxley places increasing emphasis on control of 3rd party access. Demonstration of the application of controls and audit are now mandatory.

Policy & Identity Management Solutions