Information Technology

Indiana U Expands Remote Support for IT Help

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/03/15

Indiana University has gone public with its multi-year usage of a remote support application to deliver IT help. The university system, which has 114,000 students, 23,000 employees and eight campuses is using Remote Support from Bomgar.

The institution's experience with remote support for IT got off to a rocky start. In 2007 the university's Clinical Affairs schools (part of the School of Medicine) had four service technicians supporting about 600 desktops. Although the technicians tried to implement remote support, frequently, they simply had to visit the device in person to resolve problems.

As Lisa Schunk, manager of client services for clinical affairs IT services (CAITS), explained in a prepared statement, "Our service technicians tried other tools, but these solutions were slow and they often dropped connections." So she began hunting for a better approach. After assessing several contenders, the team chose Bomgar for ease of use and reliability.

Since then, the program has been adopted by other IT support organizations at the university, which has branded it as ITHelpLlive. Now the service provides chat capability with support center consultants who can help users with computer problems online. Last year, estimated Support Center Manager Momi Ford, the chat service "fielded over 34,000 support requests."

The university runs Bomgar on an appliance, an important factor for security when dealing with health data and other sensitive information. "Bomgar's appliance works inside our firewall, and its fully encrypted sessions give us the protections we need," said Support Technician Beth Norzinskay.

Each action taken by the technician requires the user to give permission, whether it's viewing a screen, taking control of the mouse or initiating a file transfer.

The software has also been used in Boise State University, the University of Southern California and the University of Georgia, among others.