Vendors are coming up with deals to make sure disasters such as a potential bird flu outbreak don’t cripple businesses financially by forcing them into overprovisioning for those presumably brief periods when staff works from home to keep from making others sick or getting sick themselves.
Remote access vendors are making special offers they describe as insurance policies that give customers technology and services that can be implemented at a moment’s notice.
Array Networks, Aventail and Citrix have plans through which customers can buy extra licenses for just weeks or months to deal with spikes in remote access use. Service provider Positive Networks will preconfigure VPN tunnels for customers so they can turn up VPNs immediately without requiring new hardware.
Concern about the impact of a flu outbreak that could affect millions of people worries IT executives, says Rob Whiteley, an analyst for Forrester Research whose firm’s Security and Risk Council user round table discussed the problem. “They said things like, ‘We need better disaster preparation plans for things like bird flu,’ and, ‘I need infrastructure that can scale and licensing to scale with it,'” he says.
A flu pandemic would make 75 million to 90 million people sick in the United States, with as many as 2 million deaths, according to U.S. Congressional Budget Office projections. In an outbreak, large numbers of people will be forced to stay home for short periods. For example, the United Kingdom predicts an outbreak could keep 25% of the working population at home for five to eight working days.
It isn’t feasible to buy remote access capacity for peak times, only to pay for it being left idle the rest of the time, says Gene Abramov, senior security and compliance engineer for H&R Block. The Kansas City, Mo., company needs to grant 120,000 workers remote access to its network during tax season, but only 10,000 the rest of the time. “You can’t afford to buy 120,000 [full] user licenses,” he says. “It’s a question of do you have money to burn? We can’t do that.”
Instead, the company buys spike licenses from remote access vendor Aventail that lets H&R Block pay a flat fee upfront and get a license for a given number of users that is good for either 30 or 90 days. So, a customer who bought an Aventail EX 1500 SSL VPN gateway with 100 permanent licenses for $20,000 could buy 150 spike licenses good for 30 days for an extra $1,500. By comparison, it costs $11,000 to upgrade an EX 1500 from 100 to 250 users using Aventail’s regular licensing costs.
Array is promoting its Business Continuity Plan, which lets customers sign up for extra licenses one month at a time. Customers can add as many users as desired up to the capacity of the Array SSL VPN box, which ranges from 500 to 64,000 users, depending on the model.
When demand for more licenses arises, customers just start using them and get billed at the end of the month. A burst of 1,000 users would cost about $10,000, the company says.
Similarly, Citrix is introducing GoToMyPC Corporate licensing that lets users access their corporate PCs directly from remote computers. Customers pay upfront to reserve the right to turn on extra licenses then pay an additional fee if they do.
It costs $8,000 to reserve 200 emergency licenses, which allows customers to install the GoToMyPC clients on corporate PCs for one year. That’s about $40 per seat. If they start using the software, they pay an additional $12 per seat, per month. Citrix says this costs about a quarter of what it would cost to buy standard GoToMyPC licenses.
Positive Networks’ VPN service requires no special customer hardware and can be reserved for between 50 cents and $2 per user, depending on the number of users. If the service is turned on, it costs $10 per user, per month. Through the end of June, preprovisioning the emergency service is free.
Such deals can save money, but there are other things businesses can do to save. For instance, remote workers can collaborate with each other, designating only one member of a group to connect to the corporate network, says Alan Shark, executive director of Public Technology Institute, a nonprofit technology adviser to 3,000 state and local governments. “You could have one person log in [and access resources] for others. You don’t necessarily need 100% redundant systems,” he says.
Also, bird flu preparedness could be viewed as an opportunity to buy technology such as collaboration tools that would improve productivity during normal times but help keep business running in emergencies, says Steve Borsch, president of Marketing Directions. “You can look at the contingency system as something that has an upside – an ROI of its own,” Borsch says.
