One of the greatest difficulties facing the growing numbers of companies which have set up operations in African countries, is their ability to keep their computer systems up and running.
"There`s a dire shortage of IT service skills in countries like Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Angola and the DRC - all countries which are attracting investment from companies based in SA and abroad," says Dennis Duff, Regional Technical Manager at independent IT solutions provider, First Technology.
"As a result, for many companies, their only option when it comes to the repair and maintenance of their PCs is to ship the faulty machine to SA - or fly a technician up. This is enormously expensive and time-consuming.
"Indeed, companies operating outside the main metropolitan areas of SA often experience the same problem," he adds.
Duff points out that the bulk of an organisation`s IT bill comes from managing its desktops. It`s estimated that 85% of corporate IT costs - excluding the cost of downtime - are related to desktop issues including time-consuming tasks such as desktop software installations and upgrades; migration and deployment of new systems; problem management; and inventory and asset management.
Now, First Technology is able to offer a far more productive and cost-effective alternative: a remote desktop management solution, Altiris, which requires only that the PC or workstation requiring maintenance be connected via a WAN or through dial-up facilities.
This totally eliminates the need to take the PC out of its environment, or dispatch a technician, unless the problem is the result of physical hardware failure - and this can be determined by a technician hundreds of kilometres away.
Altiris also enables new software programs or upgrades to be installed on every PC and workstation virtually anywhere in the world, within a reasonable time compared to the standard methods currently being used. In the past, a technician would have had to physically go to each machine to load new software.
Similarly, in the case of a virus, a patch - once obtained - can be dropped onto the entire organisation`s system within minutes to resolve the problem. And in the case of a system crash, a registry backup, profile or a complete backup of the PC can be recovered in a fraction of the normal time it would take an engineer to accomplish.
"This means that once completed, the PC`s settings are re-installed exactly to what they were prior to the system crash. There will be no need to reinstall printer settings, loss of screen savers, re-establish shortcuts or reformat document templates. All network and drive settings will be exactly as they were.
"On upgrading PCs to a new operating systems, one often loses the entire set-up and profile of the PC. Altiris is regarded as one of the best migration tools in the market today by being able to capture profiles and settings, which takes away a lot of the pain in doing migrations or upgrades. This can be achieved remotely from a central control, keeping standards and ensuring common practices throughout an organisation.
"In fact, a user in a remote part of Africa who experiences a major system crash need not be inconvenienced for more than a bare minimum of time, depending on local LAN speeds," Duff concludes.
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