Remote access has its own Y2K problems

Best policy? Trust nobody.

By Tim Greene
Network World Fusion, 03/12/99

San Diego - Bank of America is outsourcing its remote-access service, but is keeping its old direct-dial network in place just in case the Year 2000 bug knocks out the new service.

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. This is just in case MCI WorldCom's network fails due to 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 Year 2000 changeover, there are no guarantees they will succeed. That had remote access specialists here at the Gartner Group conference this week concerned. Gartner is a networking consultancy based in Stamford, Conn.

Steve Gray, a connectivity manager for the Southern Company, an electric utility in Atlanta, says Southern is confident in its own internal Y2K program. However, its network service providers' readiness efforts are out of the company's control, and, therefore, Southern cannot be as sure of their efforts. "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 if one network fails, the other is there as a backup, says Eric Paulak, an analyst for the Gartner Group. While having a backup is a basic rule of networking, it is one that sometimes goes overlooked, he says. As an example he pointed to the widespread disruption when AT&T's frame relay network crashed last year.

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, that 800 number 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.

Other conference attendees were skeptical about whether to believe vendor claims that their products are Y2K compliant. For example, Microsoft announced last year that its Windows NT was Y2K compliant with a service upgrade, only to say later that it really wasn't. 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. "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, Inc., a power company in Salt Lake City, is testing all its remote access gear, regardless of vendors guarantees, according to Kenneth Kizer, a network support analyst for the company. 3Com says its hardware is Y2K compliant, and Raptor says its firewall is, too, but Questar has 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 systems could keep bank employees from getting to work, even if the bank's network is still running, Johnston says.

To account for 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 on 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 Contivity gear to support an Internet VPN, he says, that requires remote users to have a browser and a thin Nortel VPN client. Workers with a home PC and Internet access could connect. "We could roll that out to every user," Youngblood says.