How to take the enterprise network on the road

Sandra Weinstein, Marketing Director for Remote Access Services at AT&T, answers the most common questions faced by companies looking to support their mobile and remote employees.

More and more companies see a solid business case for providing remote and travelling employees with the same IT and communications resources available at the office. After all, empowering employees with enterprise applications, data and capabilities wherever they happen to be can affect productivity, costs and even overall competitiveness.

The hard question is: how do you make those resources accessible? How do you address the technology, management and security issues? And how should a company decide which applications and resources to make available to mobile employees?

The ideal is to take the systems that employees are able to access at their desks – e-mail, order entry, customer databases, pricing tools, inventory data and the like – and think about making those capabilities accessible outside the office, whether in a company office, in a hotel, at a customer site or even at home. Availability becomes a matter of who the employee is, not where they are. The goal is to maximise the investment already made in communications, applications and processes, and let employees use those assets, wherever they are working.

Next comes the question of access technologies. Is it wise to standardize on one remote access method – such as dial-up, wireless or public internet – to simplify administration and management? In general, it does help to standardise on technologies and systems, especially when supporting large numbers of employees. But in the mobility arena, there is no need to limit employees to one remote access method or device simply to keep everything manageable. It’s possible to allow employees to access the network through the medium available to them at the time – on whatever device they’re using. It should make no difference whether they are in a wireless hotspot in an airport, using dial-up or Ethernet in a hotel, accessing their network through a PC at a customer’s location or checking e-mail on a PDA. The access options may depend upon where they are working, but their capabilities need not be limited. Ideally, it should all be transparent to your employee.

The key is to deploy a global network ‘client’ that can automatically handle access via virtually any method or protocol, while still managing the privileges set for that user. You decide who can access what resources, and the ‘client software’ supervises the access via whatever method the employee happens to be using.

So which enterprise network architecture lends itself best to remote capabilities? There are ways to implement remote access for many different types of networking architecture – whether it’s private line, frame relay or some sort of hybrid. Remote access options are flexible on a converged IP-based network designed to carry voice, data and applications traffic. With a multi-protocol label switching (or MPLS) enabled IP network, you have an architecture that lets you manage quality of service levels for different services and applications over your network. This allows you to ensure high-performance when transmitting delay-sensitive applications, whether it’s voice, video or instant messaging.

The final question CXOs need to ask is: how can a company provide flexible and widespread access and also address the security needs of the network? Making your network available to remote workers does require additional security strategies, and in the mobility world you should consider:

• How you will authorise, recognise and authenticate that remote laptop, PDA or other device.
• How you will secure sensitive and proprietary data that may be downloaded to that remote device.
• How you will ward off malicious code that can compromise the device or the network itself.
• How you protect the remote access connection from eavesdropping or data theft.

Industry practices also suggest you need to:

• Check every access attempt against established policies.
• Deploy personal firewalls in all remote devices.
• Perform user authentication in the device, so that stolen devices cannot access the network. Use two-factor authentication if possible.
• Authenticate the device into the network, so that unauthorised devices cannot access the network (even if lost or stolen) and to ensure the device is deemed compliant.
• Encrypt sensitive data.

The decision to become a highly mobile company seems simple, but implementation is not. Technological challenges are significant. Mobility helps create a corporate competitive advantage in employee and customer satisfaction.