Remote access has its Y2K problems

SAN DIEGO - The fear of losing its remote access services to Year 2000 problems has Bank of America keeping its old direct-dial network from early retirement.

The bank is in the process of outsourcing its remote dial-up network to MCI WorldCom, but will keep its Ascend and 3Com terminal servers in place until sometime next year, just in case MCI WorldCom's network fails as a result of Y2K problems, according to Noel Johnston, consulting systems engineer at the bank's San Francisco office.

While carriers are working to bring their networks into compliance with the Y2K changeover, there are no guarantees that they will succeed.

That had remote access specialists concerned at the Gartner Group conference, held here recently. Gartner Group is a network consultancy based in Stamford, Conn.

Steve Gray, a connectivity manager for Southern Co., an electric utility in Atlanta, says Southern is confident in its own internal Y2K program.

But because its network service providers' readiness efforts are out of Southern's control, Southern cannot be guaranteed there won't be problems. "The problem is not us being Y2K-compliant, but other business partners being compliant," Gray says.

The best answer is to diversify service providers so that if one provider's network fails, the other's is there as a backup, says Eric Paulak, an analyst at Gartner Group. While having a backup is a basic rule of networking, it is one that sometimes gets overlooked, he says. As an example, he pointed to the widespread disruption of business last year when AT&T's frame relay network crashed.

Some remedies are simple for users to implement, Paulak says. For example, many corporations use 800 numbers for remote access. But not many know that for a penny more per call, 800 numbers can be split amongst carriers to share the calls. If one network has problems, the other one picks up the slack. "It costs more, but if you keep your company in business, it will be worth it," Paulak says.

For their part, carriers say they are working hard to bring their networks into compliance. For example, the regional Bell operating companies have tested their gear against each other's networks through a group they created called Telco Year 2000.

The goal of the group is to make sure that when 2000 rolls around, the carriers are able to set up calls among their networks. The group has completed one battery of tests and found that their networks will still work with each other (see graphic, page 32).

The carriers also say they are also correcting software so devices within their own networks will continue to work as the year expires.

Beyond questions about carrier readiness, conference attendees were skeptical about whether to believe vendor claims that products they sell to corporate networks are Y2K-compliant.

For example, Microsoft last year announced that Windows NT was Y2K-compliant with a service upgrade, only to say later that it really wasn't (see related story, page 37).

While NT is not directly related to remote access, Y2K patches for firewalls or remote access switches could be just as faulty, according to John Girard, vice president of Gartner Group. "Anything that has more than 100 lines of code is very difficult to debug," he says.

With that in mind, Robert McKee, director of corporate information security for The Hartford insurance company, says he is looking for a backup to his Checkpoint firewall even though Checkpoint says the firewall is compliant. The risk that Checkpoint is wrong is just too great to take, McKee says. The contingency protection will not have all the features of the current firewall, but the network will be secure, he says.

Similarly, Questar Infocomm, a power company in Salt Lake City, is testing all of its remote access gear, regardless of vendor guarantees, according to Kenneth Kizer, a network support analyst at the company. 3Com says its hardware is Y2Kcompliant and Raptor says its firewall is, too, but Questar has compliance tests scheduled for next month, Kizer says.

Bank of America is considering another twist on Y2K remote access challenges. Y2K failures, such as dead traffic lights or an inoperable public transportation system, could keep bank employees from getting to work, even if the bank's network is still running, Johnston says.

To meet that possibility, the bank is considering expanding its remote access program so workers stranded at home could dial in to work and keep the bank running. "In that case, remote access would be a business resumption tool," he says.

So the bank is trying to figure out how many people it would want in the program and how much it wants to spend to set it up, Johnston says.

Facing the same possibility in Oklahoma, the state Department of Human Services could expand its remote access program relatively easily, according to Marquette Youngblood, the department's administrator of networking and strategic planning.

The department is using Nortel Networks' Contivity gear to support an Internet virtual private network that requires remote users to have a browser and a thin Nortel VPN client, Youngblood says.

Workers with a home PC and Internet access could then connect to the office. "We could roll that out to every user," he says.