A New Approach to Delivering Remote Outsourcing Services for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) via the Internet

摘要

One of the major problems currently faced by small business owners is the high cost of maintaining a reliable computing infrastructure. Small businesses can not afford the costs demanded by network administrators and large supporting teams. At the same time it is not attractive for traditional service organizations to manage small and medium businesses given the high startup and infrastructure cost At the IBM Almaden Research Center we developed a research prototype that enables remote outsourcing services for multiple small offices from a central location via the internet. This technology provides a viable solution for both small business owners and service providers. We use the term small business for any company with 1 to 100 client machines. By linking our systems management technologies with an Internet connectivity server, small professional office LANs can be remotely monitored and managed via the Internet without need for expensive leased lines and dedicated routers for secure connectivity. 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 continue by introducing the components of the solution. The second section describes implementation details. At the end of the article we give a short summary of the work.