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Remote infrastructure management (RIM) refers to the practice of managing operating components, including policies, processes, equipment, data, human resources, and external contacts, for overall effectiveness away from the company's main premises. While RIM remains a new concept, its adoption in the Middle East and around the world has increased rapidly in recent years.

There are two major factors driving the trend. One is a rise in the outsourcing of infrastructure management, and second is the availability of tools and sufficient bandwidth to enable businesses to deploy a remote infrastructure management solution (RIMS) on their own.

In both cases, the objective can be to reduce cost of management as well as downtime. Back in 2003, Gartner predicted that RIM was likely to be a huge trend globally and forecasted that the majority of its customers would adopt the model within two years.

Today, most large companies have indeed adopted RIM in some form or other. The question remains, what lies behind the appeal of RIM?

Behind the scenes

Imagine an organisation with its head office in California - a company with more than five hundred desktops and a datacentre with hundreds of servers and 150 dispersed branch offices, each having anywhere between 20 to 100 machines. The CIO will want the datacentre to have at least 99.999% uptime and other nodes at least 99.99% uptime. In the past, to ensure that these benchmarks were met, it was necessary to install an IT team in each location or outsource the maintenance task. In the first scenario, the upfront cost has historically been very high. In the second scenario, difficulties interacting with the local vendors, with delays in communication causing downtime, is a problem.

Middle Eastern companies are now facing similar challenges, albeit on a smaller scale. However, by deploying a RIMS in-house, in a central and connected location, or by outsourcing the maintenance to a company specialising in RIM, regional enterprises can cut costs as well as ensure uptime.

The biggest challenge for a CIO today is to ensure that the core business is able to function properly without any hitches caused by the IT infrastructure. This means effective centralised monitoring and RIMS can provide just that. There are several independent network device and monitoring applications in both the commercial and open source world that are suitable for the task. In the commercial space these include HP's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, and CA's Unicenter. All of these have RIM capabilities. In the open source world, there is Nagios, OpenNMS and log polling applications such as Lire or xlog, which can fetch all the logs to a centralised location.

A key benefit of RIM is faster response times. This can be realised if a company decides to implement a centralised setup, like a network operations centre (NOC), for its RIMS - from where the IT team can access all nodes and servers at a distance from the other company sites. Problems can be spotted immediately and swift remedial action taken. This cuts down the response time dramatically and ensures higher uptime for the company's servers and nodes.

Setting up a RIMS typically represents a one time cost. After that, around 95% of the monitoring and management can be done from a single location, with the business immediately saving the cost of hiring more people in all the branch locations. Then, with proactive monitoring of the infrastructure - logically and physically, which also includes remote asset management - it is possible to keep track of the company's resources and allocate them more effectively. This can also help to reduce costs.

RIM is not all about cost saving, however. Stan Alexander, CTO of EDS, points out the "new demand from business to have IT services support the drive for agility. Enterprises need to be able to quickly bring new products and services to market. We are now seeing a major shift in how the IT team is being asked to support these goals."

Methods to implementation

Broadly speaking, RIM can be implemented in two ways. One is to outsource RIM to a service provider or ISP. Or a company can choose to do it on its own.

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Internet service providers can provide management to your applications and in house servers also, but this is often limited to web applications and services for datacentres. ISPs generally don't cover the whole gamut of services, and keep out of desktop, network and inventory management. The ISP route is desirable for those who already have an IT team for the desktop's support and maintenance, but need to outsource their applications and servers management.

The ISP provides the customer with ports that can be polled, using any network monitoring tool, in order to view the reports generated about the company setup. This helps to determine how well the ISP is going about the task, what the current trends are and whether there has been any unwarranted downtime.

There are specialised RIMS vendors dedicated to providing full support for their customers' IT infrastructure remotely. This includes support for datacentres, servers, network and even inventory management. Many companies use their own custom made software for the job. In such a setup, there is likely to be a RIM core, which is a database that captures and stores events and alerts. All alerts are fetched and sent to this RIM core using either hardware polling devices, which have been developed by the vendors, or by a common fetching mechanism such as rsync or FTP.

Alternately, a company can set up its own RIM. The enterprise can then centralise its pool of skilled IT manpower, and leave very little manpower at the branches.

There are a few prerequisites that must be taken care of such as connectivity issues, security and bandwidth requirements. Of these, security vulnerability is probably the biggest challenge for businesses deploying RIMS.

Thankfully, there are multiple ways to keep confidential data away from prying eyes. In case a company is using the internet for remote connectivity, then the first level of security would be creating a secure tunnel, for which companies can use VPN for SSH based applications. Businesses can also have an ACL based connectivity over a virtual console that requires LDAP authentication. A good example has been set by BTAT at the King Abdul Aziz Endowment Project (KAEP), the largest converged network implementation in the Middle East, where a combination of individual and group VPN authentication methods are used with a specialised application introduced to perform authentication, authorisation and accounting for the accessing of project resources.

"RIM security can relate to network or systems," says Faisal Khan, senior security consultant at McAfee. "The greatest challenge for an organisation is to ensure that during a disaster the infrastructure remains available. For example, if there is a security outbreak, it can cause a mass denial of services or an outage on the network links. On the local systems and on the local network it can practically cut off the RIM service provider."

The evolution of RIM

A recent trend that is helping to change the definition of RIM is the proliferation of smartphones and PDAs. With the adoption of new mobile technology comes the challenge of deploying, managing and securing these devices.

Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of mobile device management and synchronisation vendor Synchronica, says that a device management solution typically lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of these devices by 10 to 15%. "However, one of the main reasons companies should invest in a mobile device management solution or service is to ensure that the data stored on these devices does not get into the wrong hands," he says.

As mobile technology becomes entrenched in everyday business processes, regional enterprises need to ensure their perception of RIM is up to date and that, as with their PC networks, they have the capability to manage their mobile fleets securely.