Since Citrix Systems validated GoToMyPC by buying ExpertCity earlier this year, a new crop of small service providers are standing a lot taller.

Three companies - Positive Networks, RemotelyAnywhere and ByteTaxi - each recently rolled out simple, secure and affordable remote-access services for small and midsize businesses and professional users where a VPN is a bad fit.

Full access

Positive's PositivePro service provides a 168-bit encrypted IPSec VPN tunnel to all network resources. The client version gives users a full LAN connection over Secure Sockets Layer VPN. PositivePro WebTop provides access via any Web browser to e-mail, files, drive shares, the company intranet and client-server applications. PositivePro has a host of features, including remote desktop access like GoToMyPC. Other features include a personal firewall for each connected system, anti-virus protection, support for SecurID and other advanced security schemes, network reporting, drive sharing, data backup, private file areas where folders and drives are hidden until the user is authenticated, and remote application distribution.

The company differentiates itself from other VPN service providers by offering fast deployment at an affordable price.

"We've opened this up to a group of users who couldn't even consider remote access," says Evan Conway, Positive's executive vice president of marketing. "We get calls from companies that are stuck, saying 'My boss needs remote access for next week.' We say, 'How about by this evening?' "

The user downloads the PositivePro client onto any network server. Positive connects to it and then creates a VPN tunnel between its data center and the customer's network. Next, a support engineer configures each user's access over the phone using its policy manager, a Web-based tool that automatically maps the appropriate resources. The time from when a user calls Positive to when his first remote user is activated can be as little as one hour, Conway says.

Positive targets companies with between 50 to 1,000 users. "There are 600,000 businesses between 50 and 1,000 employees, and they don't know what they're doing when it comes to remote access," Conway says. "The 75-person shop has one IT guy who's job it is to fix PC crashes and keep the LAN up and running, not to understand the inner workings of remote-access security. "