Remote outsourcing services for multiple branch offices and small businesses via the internet

Abstract

Maintaining a reliable computing infrastructure encompassing servers, clients, printers and Internet connections is one of the major problems faced by branch office managers and small business owners. The cost associated with good systems administration is too high for either small businesses or branch offices. At the same time large service corporations don't see this market as attractive due to the high startup and infrastructure cost. We at IBM Almaden Research Center developed a research prototype that enables remote outsourcing services for multiple small offices from a central location via the Internet using the already available commercial software. This technology provides a solution for both small business owners (branch office managers) and service providers. We use the term small business for any company with one to 100 client machines. For our purposes branch offices can be categorized as small businesses. By combining our newly developed systems management technologies with an existing Internet connectivity server, small office LANs can be remotely monitored and managed via the Internet. At the same time the need for expensive leased lines and dedicated routers for secure connectivity is removed since both routing and security are provided through software. In this paper we will describe the approach taken as well as utilized software and hardware components. Now that we described the target environment we introduce all of the components of the solution. In the second section we describe implementation details. Short summary of the work is given at the end of the article.