Accessing the "Cloud" - Remotely!

Submitted by kakroo on Thu, 2009-12-10 13:00.

Another service that interested me at Cloudforce2 was the LogMeIn service. Why? Well read on...

The two guys Mr. Julian & Mr. Csaba gave me a warm welcome at their stall. At first I thought that LogMeIn by the sound of it may be another security service provider which might be into user authentication! And I was so wrong, I admit. It turned out to be a great service that a SFDC user can integrate on its platform to provide remote customer service support.

The user generates a temporary six digit pin from his end and enters the pin to request for remote service. Once this pin is verified by service provider he is requested to download software at his end. This software gives access to the service centre to remotely access the user system. The service centre people can perform routine inspections remotely and troubleshoot the issue. “The main thing is that a user has to approve each and every stage to give access to his/her machine”. Once the call is over “the software is removed automatically, and both the user as well as service provider has to perform one action each. The service provider gets to put the comments for the call and whether the call is closed while the user is asked for a short feedback on the service provided”. The application “is also provided for mobile devices like Blackberry”.

“Most of the 70 million customers of LogMeIn services are using the free version, while there are around 1000 corporate users like Symantec, Geek Squad etc. The service uses a 256 AES level encryption.” What honestly confused me (even though I really liked the confidence of the guys about their service being 100% secure!) was their comment “The security of our service is as secure as the online banking”.

No doubt online banking is secure and they use symmetric keys to keep the channel secure. All I am concerned is that the way online banking “trusts” a user to do everything right, similarly how far can we trust the “user” with not giving access to some “untrusted” party for remote access to his/her device?

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