Remote

Posted on 29 Apr 2014 at 12:50

Steve Cassidy reveals how overexcited salespeople are bumping up prices for key parts of remote server management tools

Remote server management is an absolute cornerstone of the IT wonk's life.

A recent project to upgrade a client's domain controller to Windows Server 2012 R2 turned into an agonising trial, progressively falling back onto ever-narrower bandwidth communications.

We discovered that the client's domain was so broken that LogMeIn's security precautions wouldn't permit remote access, even to fix its own problem. We had to descend from the full screen-copying remote view, down to terse text messages such as "changed password, try it again", and finally to long, stressed emails.

In the post-Christmas lull when this happened, it became clear that the cellular phone networks wouldn't let us keep in contact with each other even that way.

It's astonishing how dependent I've become on this mode of remote support. Almost every nerd I know is in the same boat, and jealously guards and defends their preferred remote-support tool against all comers.

Almost every nerd I know is in the same boat, and jealously guards and defends their preferred remote-support tool against all comers

There's even a split between those who have succeeded with Windows Remote Assistance, and those who (sorry to be blunt here) must deal with people who simply can't be trusted to read out or type in a complex password when under stress. And requiring remote diagnosis definitely qualifies as stress.

Unfortunately, this surprisingly diverse marketplace isn't without its pointless obstructions, passing fads and lunatic responses. Most of us support-givers know it's no longer acceptable to leave an open VNC session on a computer with direct access to the internet.

That's why almost all the services with any cloud angle to their remote support now adopt a one-way link model, where you download a door-opener app that registers with the software vendor's access portal website, and the support-giver then signs in with a management app. Overexcited salespeople

Unfortunately, the fact that this process is mediated via the cloud - in this case, the vendor's portal site - seems to have over-excited the salespeople. They've figured out that without this architecture, support-givers (people like me, in brief) have to put together an impressive stack of perfectly compatible kit for every single remote contact in their address book.

If I haven't yet managed to leave an SSL VPN in every site I've ever visited, I'm sufficiently immodest to believe it's too high a bar, and one that most other support guys have yet to clear, too.

This encourages vendors of portal-based remote-control applications to become aggressive when charging for services.

Users of LogMeIn Free have recently had their free-access accounts abruptly terminated, but that's nowhere near as bad as the problems surrounding German-based TeamViewer. There, the central management program is the expensive part, while the remote agent is a free download. TeamViewer tales

TeamViewer is, I'll admit, technically excellent, but £2,219 for the corporate version, temporarily reduced to a mere £1,769? If you're a big corporation, you're likely to have the WAN infrastructure in place to make such smart remote-control apps redundant anyway.

It gets darker still. TeamViewer will let you have a free management app if you're not doing anything "commercial" with it, but the level to which they monitor your usage patterns is in itself deeply worrying. I've heard complaints from trustworthy people who said they were abruptly cut off from free use, with no possibility of appeal, by a peremptory email.

Or maybe that's just a revenue-raising exercise: I've also heard an as-yet-unsubstantiated rumour that one mid-sized support business was sent a Final Demand - with a very short deadline - for its full-fat £899 version of TeamViewer. The demand suggested that if the company didn't pay almost immediately, it would be unable to carry on using the product.

This is serious hardball. Yes, of course, there may be another side to the story, and if the business is large-scale with a hefty commercial value attached to its work, it should treat the software platform it relies on as a source of commercial risk, and price and protect its services accordingly.

But that doesn't justify a software vendor binding their unwilling customers into a premium-priced, no-comeback, no-escape relationship, just by changing their product architecture so that it has to pass through their own cloud.

For one thing, when it comes to the remote-control software sector, there are plenty of cheaper, easier options out there for us nerds - especially irritated nerds - to investigate. Could this become another "Microsoft moment" in the software business? Download a year of Steve Cassidy's Networks columns by heading to our Free Downloads site

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