Mobile systems management maturing fast

One of the most frustrating aspects of being an IT professional who is required to be on call to respond to emerging support issues has long been the lack of flexibility available to these employees when trying to balance work with their home lives.

However, with the growing maturity of wireless IT systems support applications, some managers claim that the related lifestyle issues that have pushed many a qualified professional out of the business or into other areas of work are becoming less demanding and wearisome.

The real-world scenarios facilitated by mobile remote systems management might seem trivial to business managers who see the 24/7 time demand on IT workers as something that comes with the territory.

But executives who oversee these types of employees and deal with the problems created by the need to encroach on support specialists' personal lives say that mobile support technologies are having a significant impact.

"We have one worker who owns a boat, and now he's able to reboot servers or provision passwords from out on a lake rather than being forced to sit at home with his laptop just in case something happens over the weekend," said Mark Kolodzej, vice president of IT and head of the Infrastructure Services Department for financial services giant ING Investment Management Group.

Prior to adopting mobile support applications two years ago, ING workers who were on call were required to stay at home or at least close to their broadband-connected-PCs.

Today they're allowed to be anywhere in the company's home town of Atlanta where they can use their BlackBerry devices to meet their responsibilities.

"These mobile support technologies not only allow for improved quality of life but also give us more flexibility and allow us to get better use out of out resources," Kolodzej said. "The interfaces have gotten to a point where we have workers who are close to a computer telling us they still prefer to use the handheld; I think that's a pretty strong endorsement of how much value they see in the tools."

ING is using a set of applications made by Rove (formerly known as Idokorro Mobile) that allow workers to carry out multiple types of support tasks that traditionally have been limited to full-sized computer screens, including purpose-built tools designed to integrate with the firm's existing Citrix infrastructure management technologies.

Kolodzej said that the process of adding the tools to ING's BlackBerry devices, and training workers how to use them, has been relatively pain-free.

As with any type of remote systems management application, ensuring that the entire ecosystem is properly secured is a major concern, but the back-end integration with Research In Motion's BlackBerry server VPN architecture addresses the issue completely, he said.

"For our network and server engineers, there was very little transition; the interface might be slightly different, but concepts are the same for restarting a server or service, or administration of Active Directory," he said. "Security is not really an issue as we already have the BlackBerry infrastructure in place, and our CTO and risk management team were quickly satisfied that this was a system didn't introduce any new concerns."

Rove executives contend that their business is growing rapidly with more than 4,600 enterprise customers using the tools, representing a wide array of vertical markets.