Teleworking has moved from nice to have, to must have. Found
somewhere in the corporate handbook under "business continuity",
"building a sustainable business", or "improving employee
satisfaction", working remotely has come of age,writes
Roger Hockaday, director of marketing atAruba
NetworksEMEA.
Some companies dictate it, some countries legislate for it, but
every company must have a plan that allows a significant part of
its workforce to work from home. Whether implemented as part of a
swine flu pandemic plan, avoiding disruption from industrial
action, or to provide a flexible working environment for employees,
teleworking is an essential element of modern business
practice.
For the occasional teleworker, a client (or SSL) based VPN
installed on a laptop remains an excellent, and proven, solution.
For a single user (with a single laptop), it offers better security
and control than the vast majority of small branch office or
consumer grade networking solutions.
Hidden costs and complexity of teleworking
However, the traditional client VPN with simple connectivity for
a single laptop is not the ideal platform for teleworking when
multiple services - data, voice, mobility, and always-on
connectivity - are required. To provision a true "office-like"
teleworker experience, several challenges exist:
To create a remote working environment that is identical to the
office is a greatly underestimated challenge: having to start a VPN
client prior to connection before connecting "to the office" can be
frustrating. VPN client tunnels are not always as reliable as a
"fixed" connection, and affect the performance of the PC.
Beyond a simple VPN solution, remote office solutions involving
routers are complex to set up (in comparison with a VPN) and suffer
from relatively high operational costs.
What is required is the ability to provision a service for
"power" teleworkers with the characteristics of a 24/7 network
connection, combined with the simplicity of VPN management.
Virtual branch networks
The idea of a "VPN in a box" has existed for some years. It
however remains at heart a router, with the complexity and required
configuration of a router. It is expensive and difficult to scale
to a large home-worker population, particularly compared to the
ease of centralised configuration, control and security of a
traditional VPN managed from the datacentre.
Like a VPN, but unlike a remote office router solution, a
virtual branch network centralises and virtualises the control of
all remote offices. Security and encryption, per user control,
policy management of users and applications are all centralised
within the datacentre. Low-cost access points (whether wired or
wireless) provide secure connection back to the datacentre for
remote users. Services such as data and corporate voice (VoIP)
extensions, guest and consultant networks are set up once and then
replicated automatically as each user or new office comes online.
Best of all, the remote user has an experience identical to the
user in the office.
Widespread adoption of telecommuting obliges an organisation to
reconsider its IT model. It should not increase IT costs - indeed,
the use of telecommuting should reduce overall costs.
Virtualisation and centralisation of applications is a
well-accepted practice. Now is the time to do the same for remote
networks rather than continue relying on the traditional router
model.