Five ways to bulk up your network for telecommuters
Tips for adapting your corporate network for people working from home
By
Brad Reed
,
Network World
, 10/21/2008
- Share/Email
- Tweet This
- Print
Whether they're in branch offices to home offices, workers are increasingly telecommuting instead of working in a traditional centralized office environment.
For many companies, this trend presents many benefits as well as challenges. On the plus side, a recent survey shows that telecommuting increases worker productivity by allowing for more flexible working hours, and it saves companies
money on reimbursing transportation costs and on office materials. On the down side, telecommuting can produce major security and privacy risks for companies that extend their WANs out to their employees' homes without giving them the knowledge or the tools to connect
to the corporate network securely.
That means the big challenge for many companies is how to not only expand the reach of their WAN, but also keep it fast, secure
and reliable. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Performance Optimization products.) Here is a review of five of the most important techniques, technologies and practices that companies can adopt
to bolster their telecommuter WAN performance, and whether they should look outside their own in-house IT departments to meet
some of these challenges.
Make sure your employees have strong home broadband connections
This may seem obvious, but the first step to ensuring that your WAN can accommodate telecommuters is to ensure that their
connections are up to speed for the corporate network. After all, security and software updates won't help anyone if the Internet
pipe isn't strong enough to download them from the corporate network at a reasonable pace. This gets tricky, however, when
telecommuters live in areas of the country that don't have access to fast cable or DSL services. In these cases, says Kelly
Brown, the group manager for Internet and mobility services at Verizon Business, there is very little a company can do to
upgrade a connection speed, and companies must look for ways to either upgrade the connection speed on the margins or upgrade
to a stronger connection altogether.
One way to upgrade at the margins is to make sure that the PCs being used by the workers are fully optimized and have enough
memory and hard drive space to fully take advantage of the Web connection they're working from, Brown says. Eric Bozich, the
vice president of product management for Qwest, says another option for companies looking to upgrade at the margins would
be to invest in WAN acceleration technology that optimizes Internet routing and maximizes speeds for enterprise applications.
He says one such product is Akamai's IP application accelerator that continuously scours the Web for the fastest and most reliable path to an origin server, much like a traffic helicopter
that reports on which roads are clogged or open during rush hour. Other WAN acceleration vendors include Array Networks, Converged
Access, Expand Networks, Juniper, Orbital Data, Packeteer, Riverbed Technology, Silver Peak Systems and Swan Labs.
But if WAN acceleration and PC optimization still don't get your connection where it needs to be, then you may want to consider
upgrading your teleworkers' connection speeds.
Partner Content
Simplify Your Branch Infrastructure
Learn how to simplify your branch infrastructure while dramatically increasing app performance with Citrix Branch Repeater.
Download the Free Info Kit
Next-Gen Load Balancing
Free Guide: "Next Gen Load Balancing: 8 Things You Need to Handle Today's Network Traffic" shows you the functionality needed in your next load balancer.
Download the Free Guide
Accelerate Your Web Apps by up to 5x
Free Guide: "The Secret to Getting Maximum Speed from your Web Applications."' Learn how you can deliver Web apps up to 5x faster.
Download the Free Guide
Comments (5)
Thin ClientBy Grolan on October 21, 2008, 5:55 pmYou missed one option for accomplishing the stated goals - costlier than the others, perhaps, but a good solution - and that is going thin client throughout. That's...
Reply | Read entire comment
Cisco has a WANopt offering tooBy Anon on October 21, 2008, 7:51 pmYou missed them in your list.
Reply | Read entire comment
The True IssueBy wopro on October 21, 2008, 8:39 pmI find some real issues are missed here: 1. The list of supposed solution providers is out of date. Orbital Data, Swan Lab and Packeteer are no longer in existence...
Reply | Read entire comment
VIrtuial OfficeBy Anonymous on October 22, 2008, 8:46 am5 Mps broadband access? get real, we went to virtual officing 5 years ago, NO ONE has more than 1.5 Mbps download speed, we do video conferances, IM, etc, with open...
Reply | Read entire comment
You missed the BIG oneBy Anonymous on October 24, 2008, 5:28 amLatency and the upstreams capacity is often the issues.
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments