Infrastructure for Instant Remote Management |
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Introduction: Remote Management of networks, servers, desktops, applications offers exciting new business prospects to VARs, SIs, MSPs and outsourcers. It is expected that the IT management services market will be US$141 bn by 2005 with a large proportion being done remotely due to the cost savings and potential for increased service levels. Furthermore, the US Census Bureau, organizations report 14 days of lost employee productivity per annum due to IT related issues accounting for as high as 60% of IT related costs. MSP@SAAZ is a unique software and security infrastructure for MSPs to build comprehensive remote management ability with very low capital investments offering a very quick ROI (Return on Investment). Problem: Remote Management, despite its clear benefits, has barriers to its widespread adoption - especially when it comes to SMB organizations. Firstly, most organizations have implemented firewalls, NATs, proxy servers and IP masqueraders which make remote management hard to configure and necessarily requiring a VPN for remote management to happen via public IP network. Secondly, while full enterprise management suites are available for Fortune 1000 companies, most SMBs tend to rely on an assortment of point tools which do not cover the entire lifecycle of IT management. Both these issues require large investments from an MSP perspective and extensive implementation times both of which make remote management highly costly and complex. MSP@SAAZ - The complete solution MSP@SAAZ is a complete solution developed by Zenith Infotech in order to cut through the barriers to remote management. Based on Zenith's SAAZ product which has been successfully implemented in over a 100 organizations, MSP@SAAZ provides a software and security infrastructure to cover the full life cycle of managing IT infrastructure remotely. First of all, it provides a method for securely managing remote networks across the Internet or any public IP network without the need for setting up a VPN, "dumbing-down" or opening ports of the firewall, without the need for a public or fixed IP and works transparently across the NAT. It uses the SSH2 protocol in an outbound mode making it highly secure and the use of certificates adds an extra layer of protection over and above the encryption and security already available in SSH2. Secondly, it provides a complete suite offering management and monitoring of desktops, servers, networks and applications - obviating the need to purchase point products and piecing them together to a have a solution to address the complete IT management lifecycle. MSP@SAAZ provides the following as a part of its suite: a. Desktop Management b. Advanced Server Monitoring and Management c. Application Monitoring - Performance, Fault and Capacity Management for Databases d. Network Management for any SNMP compatible device e. Help Desk and Trouble Ticketing (optional) MSP@SAAZ costs at least 70% less than competing solutions in the marketplace and can be deployed in less than a day. Moreover it does not require a complex NOC-like setup at the MSP end, reducing the capital investments into a few thousand dollars. |