It seems like my company has more people traveling and having reliable access to the Internet is becoming more important. Most of our laptops are coming equipped for some flavor of WiFi. Is that enough?
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WiFi is certainly an option worth considering. You need to look at the availability of WiFi access where your employees are traveling. There are more and more hotsports popping up. The question is will they be where your employees are traveling? More and more hotels/motels are offering WiFi access but some still want to charge for the availability. Occuring additional chargers for “temporary” internet access also need to be considered in the overall cost evaluation of the different alternatives.
One alternative is mobile broadband from carriers such as Sprint and Cingular (or AT&T). Although this comes with a recurring monthly charge, it may have other benefits such as reliability of speed and/or availability of service where your employees need it. In looking at the carrier level offerings, see if they can provide you with MPLS service that might be able to have the employees with secure access onto your corporate network. This may require some type of VPN client be installed on the laptops but a step well worth the investment of time to protect sensitive corporate data.
Having the laptops configured for some type of dialup access wouldnt be a bad thing to consider. Although most of the WiFi and mobile broadband offerings I have talked about should be available just about everywhere your folks may be travelling, it might just save the day to have a fallback option for connectivity when nothing else will work. Slow access will be better than no access at all when an important email or document has to get through as quickly as possible.
Regardless of which mobile connectivity solution works out the best for you, I would strongly suggest that you either incorporate VPN access for remote access to be one further step to protecting corporate communications. You can either have the employees connect to a VPN appliance at your corporate office or use a third part solution such as HotSpotVPN that keeps the data encrypted until it is off the wireless part of the Internet connection. No one solution will be totally foolproof but it may present just enough of a challenge to cause would be hackers to move onto easier targets.
