Remote Assistance is a Windows feature with which you’ll be familiar. However, the phrase is a generic term for the computer support that can be given online so that your computer can be accessed remotely by a technician, helping you through complicated problems that you wouldn’t perform yourself. Even better than phone support, because the technician can access and manipulate your computer remotely, he or she can do the job for you.

Services that offer virtualization hosting will also offer support of this kind almost by default. Half a century ago, a number of terminals would be hooked up to a mainframe. Today, the workstation has far more of its own technology on its hard drive and circuitry. However, due to the nature of the services provided by your virtualization host, the terminals and large CPU model is appropriate. The distributed processing network changes the face of technology. Because applications may be run on the server end, software patches that are required when bugs are found may be all done from the remote host – access to your machine is kept to a minimum. Depending on the level of detail provided by the managed hosting service, you won’t have trouble with buggy software.

Again, depending on your level of service, there are language libraries that link your application to the web service. The work performed on the computer may have a “native” look, but that’s because language libraries are in the background doing the hard work to give it that look and feel. Their functions include handling default parameter values and checking for conditions that are in error. The key management functionality (both private and public) and all other service provision are easily enhanced so that problems that may arise are dealt with at the host site. All the techie stuff your computer support team would have had to deal with is dealt with by the techies providing remote distributed processing services.