Take control of telework support

Partnering with a managed broadband provider can reduce costs, ease administration.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of America turned to telework in 1999 to ease the travel burden of its regional service directors. Traditionally, directors worked out of regional offices but spent much of their time traversing hundreds of miles to visit each club that was their responsibility. By instead relocating directors in home offices, the organization could reduce travel time and costs, and increase productivity.

There was only one problem. The organization’s IT department, headquartered in Atlanta, didn’t have the resources to support the home workers. So it turned to Netifice Communications (at the time called TeleCommute Solutions) to handle everything from home office setup, to broadband and VPN provisioning, to tech support and remote monitoring.

Bill Regehr, The Boys and Girls Clubs’ CIO and retired IT executive at IBM, is particularly impressed with Netifice’s 24-7 help desk. “You call the 800 number, and they know who you are and what you need. Companies just don’t get it. They think they can do this themselves. You can provide 24-7 yourself? In reality, the remote user just has to fend for himself.”

Telework-focused companies such as Netifice and TManage have offered managed services and consulting for about five years. But with the increase of corporate workers using high-speed connections to access the network off-hours and while traveling, the broader category of managed remote access, or managed broadband, has begun taking shape. Other vendors include Axcelerant and MegaPath, as well as dial-up services companies iPass and Fiberlink, which also offer high-speed access via 802.11b hot spots. EPresence, formerly Banyan Worldwide, also just released bbVPN, its broadband provisioning and management product. AT&T and Verizon have offerings, as do system integrators Electronic Data Systems and CompuCom.

Most providers offer line provisioning (some mix of DSL, cable, ISDN, analog, and the like), as well as installation, managed VPN and firewall services, worldwide dial-up access, service-level agreements (SLA) and consolidated billing. Some providers, including TManage and Netifice, will set up home offices on-site, while others send out the equipment they configure remotely. TManage continues to offer Web-based telework training but no longer actively pursues the consulting business.

Services cost $100 to $140 per user per month, and appeal most to companies that already outsource their VPN and firewall services, and want to consolidate remote and mobile workers’ services, as well as decrease costs.

“IT folks are running out of places to squeeze that extra 4% of cost,” says Netifice CTO Jeff Pompeo. “So they’re looking for smaller things, like a way to take 1,000 remote people with dial-up accounts plus DSL accounts they bought themselves that they’re expensing, put it all together, take a little cost out and centrally manage it.”

Costs vs. worth

But the cost issue is tricky. On one hand, these companies make it possible to provision residential broadband services for business use, saving money. Contracting with Verizon or Comcast can cost about $90 (per user per month) for business-class service. On the other hand, services from remote access service providers cost more than that, so make sure the additional services you’re buying – such as managed VPN, firewall, help-desk support, SLAs – are worth the price.

Remote management and monitoring are integral pieces of these offerings. Typically, vendors provide a Web-based management interface that lets network executives view and make adjustments to user endpoints. TManage’s application lets you check the status of an order or trouble ticket, and view users’ various stages of broadband deployment.

The vendor monitors and troubleshoots connections remotely. Netifice can monitor VPN connections, so when a user’s connection goes down, Netifice can determine whether the broadband connection or the VPN is the problem. It will monitor other devices on the corporate network, such as an existing firewall, and can set security policies that send an alert when a remote worker’s firewall or VPN tunnel is shut down or a nonwork laptop tries to connect to the corporate network.

Netifice is the only company in the field to offer private IP network services because of its acquisition of ISP Epoch Internet last year. The company now offers both off-net broadband and VPN services, as well as on-net VPN service that keeps data traffic off the Internet, to enhance security and increase reliability. “Customers often use a mix of on-net for users in larger cities, and off-net for users who live in remote areas,” Pompeo says.

David Willis, vice president of infrastructure strategies for Meta Group, has mixed feelings about Netifice’s model. “Companies like this always end up in conflict with selling on-net services that justify their existence, and selling off-net services and being network agnostic. The whole reason they exist is because Verizon and Comcast don’t have a big enough footprint. Historically, it’s been a liability to have your own VPN backbone. Costs are higher,” he says.

It’s also important to keep in mind these companies can make broadband connections only so reliable. Not even Netifice’s private IP network can provide 100% uptime for the last mile of the broadband connection. If your remote workers need more reliable connections, you’ll need to rethink frame relay service.