Monitor Remote Vendors & 3rd Party Providers

Optimize the outsource support ecosystem
by monitoring remote access

The Need: Contractors, offshore support teams and outsourcing suppliers expose your corporate network to countless remote users.

You've established a VPN and installed RSA tokens. But that is only the first step.
You need to monitor remote user access, in order to know what they are doing once they connect to your network.

• Know who made each configuration change
• Validate SLA commitments and verify billable activity
• Reduce time-to-repair for system outages

It's a fact of life that 3rd party vendors require access your corporate network. But this shouldn't come at the expense of your intellectual property or sensitive data security!

No more fingerpointing: Full visibility into 3rd party user activity.

With ObserveIT on your network, you can review every action that takes place. No more fingerpointing, no more hunting for cause of changes, and no more wondering what they do on your servers once you give them access. When you record remote access, all doubt disappears.

Benefits for Third-Party Monitoring

• Improved security: A 'security camera' is the best deterrent against known-user security breaches.
• Accountability: Spend less time pointing fingers, and more time improving business.
• SLA validation: When both sides of the vendor-customer relationship can show precise SLA response time and billable activity, the level of trust and confidence indreases dramatically.
• Policy messaging: Deliver critical information to remote users each time they log on.
• Get back on your feet faster: Fix server outages fast by seeing the root-cause of error, not just the symptoms.

'Video Cameras' on your servers - Security and deterrence

Without user session recording, authorized users can do anything they want on your network once they log on. But when remote users know that every action is being recorded, they are not tempted into 'funny business'. Just like a video camera a bank, It may not physically prevent theft, but it stops 99% of potential attacks before they start, by promising swift identification of any policy violators. ObserveIT also provides real-time alerts about specific user activity- according to any policy rule you wish to track. And with session playback available directly from any network security platform (ex. SCOM, CA, OpenView), you can rest assured that any improper actions are stopped before they even get started.

No more Fingerpointing: Eliminating doubt

IT managers need to spend more time improving the company business, and less time playing the blame-game. Similarly, outsource vendors want to perform their assignments without concern of accusations. With remote access monitoring of every action that took place on your servers, you are no longer left wondering who performed each action.

Imagine a situation where a remote support technician logs on for a routine maintenance task, performs the task, and then logs off. An hour later, you notice that 50,000 records in your customer transaction database were deleted. It's hard to believe that the trustworthy support tech would have done it, but the timing makes you suspicious. How can you be sure what he did while logged on? When you record remote access, all doubt disappears. Simply see a list of every file, application and resource that the tech used, and replay a video of the full session if desired.

Measure SLA commitments and billable hours reporting

Most relationships between customers and outsource vendors are based on trust and experience. Support Level Agreements are a cornerstone of this trust. But achieving an accurate measurement of support response time is not an easy task.

ObserveIT shows you exact timing of vendor activity, verifying your SLA commitments. Vendors enjoy the fact that doubt and subjective measurements are eliminated, by solid, objective proof of the high service quality. Dates and times of support activity are no longer a vague guessing game. Remote access monitoring gives you detailed reports of every activity performed by your outsource support team.

Be sure that users confirm policy and user ticket info

Keeping your IT environment running smoothly requires ongoing communications. For example, it may be critical that for the next two weeks, no one should run a trace on the production database between 07:00 and 14:00. You sent out an email to all your IT staff. But what about all the employees working for your 3rd party vendors? You may have told your point of contact, but did she deliver the message to each of her employees? And even if so, will they remember the next time they log on?

ObserveIT delivers important policy messages to each user, right as they log on. Users are required to confirm before continuing with their session, assuring you that policy messages have reached their targeted users.

This interaction can also be used to collect information from the user: 'Ticket-number' support mechanisms can track each support activity and associate each user audit with a particular support issue.

Increase Independence and Reduce the time to repair

When you suffer a service outage, the most important question is "What happened on this server?" Change Management tools show you 'deltas' of what config files or registry values were modified. But what caused those changes? A single checkbox in a user dialog box can trigger dozens of system config changes.

ObserveIT takes you straight to the root cause of the problem by recording remote access. Replaying each user session on the problematic server will show you exactly what to undo. Instead of spending time wondering what might have triggered the changes, remote access monitoring lets you simply undo the steps.