You can hardly blame IT support teams for feeling beleaguered these days. The world that IT service management has to support has irretrievably broken through the enterprise firewall. No business today can afford to be an island and IT support can no longer function on the assumption of a single internal network infrastructure. But many ITSM tools were designed for precisely that use case and thus they have no framework for safely delivering support beyond the internal corporate network.

Fortunately there are ways around this. But first of all let’s be realistic at the scale of the change that’s taken place in the past few years. Any hope of containing or limiting the activity that takes place beyond the firewall is misplaced. The world is moving to the public Web and most of the business processes and interactions that matter to an enterprise – with customers, prospects, employees, partners, suppliers and outsourced resources – already take place beyond the corporate firewall.

Users today are working out of the office, accessing IT resources over the public or mobile Internet and often from their own personal smartphones, home computers or touch tablets. The devices they rely on are becoming more diverse and more sophisticated with every product cycle. They’re capable of holding a ton of data and their capacities are increasing day by day.

If resistance is futile (and it is) then all of this has to be acknowledged and supported. Users must be supported and the data and applications they use must be protected, even though they may be deeply embedded in the public Internet and running on devices that they’ve acquired off their own bat. What’s more, they demand a response as soon as they encounter problems and expect you to help them wherever they are – on the road, at clients, at home.

What are the strategies enterprises can adopt to meet those demands? What has worked for you? What are you seeking? I'd like to hear from you.