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CHALLENGE

Providing an ounce of prevention when I can’t get to a client’s laptops?

Asked by Tony Moraros, owner, TonyTheComputerGuy.com, San Mateo, CA - March 11, 2010

I own a small IT consulting and services company, with several local, small businesses as my clients. One of them is an eight-employee branch office of a PR firm in San Francisco. Everyone at the PR firm uses laptops. These are PR folks, and they live on their computers. When they’re in the office, they’re working on the laptops. When they’re out of the office, they have the laptops with them. If you take their computer away, they’re dead in the water. So the thing I’m wrestling with is, how do I maintain their laptops if I have at most minimal access to their systems? The client suffers because the only time I can work on the computer is when the computers aren’t working. The only time I can maintain their system is when it fails, which isn’t really in their best interest either. Can anyone point me to procedures, processes, or tools that would make it less disruptive, let alone possible, for me to obtain access to these systems to monitor and maintain them? I actually have a trial version of one remote management tool from a company called Kaseya But it’s so heavy duty I don’t think I have enough knowledge to use it properly.

Topics: Collaboration , Computers , Infrastructure Management

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  • I think you're on the right track looking into managed solutions packages that you can offer to your clients (not just the one PR office). I would suggest keeping up the search for one that offers an agent that isn't so heavy. Have you looked at Hound Dog? ( http://www.hounddogiseasy.com/ ) I recall researching them in the past, but can offer no specific experience with them, unfortunately. I'm sure you cna find one out there that suits your needs.

    For remote support (rather than simply monitoring), TeamViewer might be one of your best bets. It offers various tools for managing client connections such as remote control apps that don't require installation to use and the TeamViewer Manager to keep track of all of your clients PCs. You might also want to look into purchasing a Bomgar remote control appliance for your consulting company. You could then advertise it as one of your offered services.

    Furthermore, since it sounds like that particular firm is so reliant on laptops (and thus the data is at a higher risk), you may want to look into a CDP backup solution. With byte/block level backup systems, PCs can be continuously backed up around the clock while users work. You can then restore them to virtually any point in time even up to a millisecond before the hard drive crash (or whatever caused the hardware to fail). With a CDP unit in the office and studiously used VPN connections on traveling clients' laptops, you have the potential to be able to offer an amazing level of data protection. Of course, bandwidth is a concern if remote users are editing massive image files which would need to be pulled across the wire, but that's where byte-level CDP backups would really shine. Also, the impact of the backup agent on the PC will be something you'll have to evaluate. As an example, you may be interested in some of the smaller CDP units offered by SonicWall such as the 210 model.

    To round this discussion off (I think I've taken it a bit off topic...), you may want to look into the possibility of LoJack for laptops (particularly if there is BIOS support in the laptops). If your clients lose them, you can track them and even remote wipe them. With the CDP backups, you could reapply the once-n-done image that you took to a new laptop and then apply the byte based versioned backups and they're back to work. They could potentially be back to the exact same state that the laptop was in when they lost it. If you use hardware-agnostic imaging like some vendors offer, you can even apply the image to a completely different laptop model.

    I hope this helps!
  • tmoraros
    Wow! Wesley thank you very much. Per your suggestion, I'm checking in to http://www.hounddogiseasy.com I noticed they interface with http://www.AutoTask.com, what I use for managing my service calls. We currently have Symantec Backup Exec in place for Laptop backup.
    Regards,
    Tony Moraros
    http://www.TonyTheComputerGuy.com
  • I'm biased, but I use Experts Exchange Mobile to solve tech issues when my wi-fi goes down or get the blue screen of death. http://mobile.experts-exchange.com/
  • argint
    I would be very interested in follow ups to this post. We have a very similar problem. I consider our whole IT system to be "mobile". I never know when they will be in office or out. We too are considering Kaseya, as it manages to work behind firewalls etc. Having our own software with Active Directory and Group policies may be a way. But I have no experience of how this would work over a totally mobile workforce.
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