Remote working – Why Not Take The Office LAN Home?
Remote working doesn’t have to be a challenge…
This article was inspired by our MD Steve Hodges after setting up his home access when he recently joined Astro. This has been a hot topic for many years and I am sure many years to come. I am currently writing a series of blog articles about the technical challenges of remote access for anyone unfortunate enough to be beyond broadband reach. In the meantime, a success story in which I hand over to Mr Hodges part way through so he can tell you in his own words. Assuming I can wake him up?
OK then, me first, me first…
Everyone is more or less up to speed with the need to implement flexible working options for staff nowadays. Whether it is for legislative, operational or financial reasons the take up of ‘home worker’ or ‘remote working’ options has been meteoric over recent years. With it has come adaptations in technology ranging from VPN Clients, VDI, Outlook Anywhere for Exchange, OWA all the way back to Citrix Access Gateways for application deployment. All very good!
“The reality is… home workers need more than access to applications from home…”
The reality is, however, that home workers need more than access to applications from home. They need to be passed through the web content and mail filters. They need a range of applications not just one or two. They need VoIP connectivity and access to secure information. Not all of which is in the ‘The Cloud’ yet and even if it is in a Private Cloud, it still requires secure access.
I have had mixed experience remote working throughout my career, and even when I have predominantly worked from an office, I have needed remote access in the evenings and weekends. I have also needed remote access into my customers to support their systems across the UK. Having remote access into my own network and my customers networks has been a way of life for me for the best part of my career. If I lost the ability to work remotely I would not be able to function to say the least.
I have been subjected to the majority of access technologies over the past four decades with varying results. I started with dial up asynchronous X.25 access with a dumb terminal and an acoustic coupler. I then progressed in the late 80s to early 90s onto a dial up modem into our LAN using PCAnywhere (Carbon Copy rings a bell too?) and soon after into a Perle RAS (Remote Access Server). The Perle RAS was my first reasonable experience of remote LAN access, allowing me access onto our Novell network and our customers LANs seamlessly (albeit slowly). In fact, all of the technologies up until this time were unreliable. But it was all we had so it had to do.
“Even the high end credible VPN gateway and software client solutions have the occasional operating system issues”
Then came remote access via software VPN clients into a PC or hardware gateway and these are still current technologies. VPN access was certainly more reliable than all of the previous technologies but even this could still be problematic at times. Even the high end credible VPN gateway and software client solutions have the occasional operating system issues requiring a reboot, and sometimes they even blue screen (typically with driver issues). Also. some of these solutions do not have a suitable transparent or reliable client for a tablet or smart phone.
Now over to Mr Hodges…
On one occasion – in a previous life – I was given access via an SSL VPN on a router that sent all of my home network traffic to the office. The security implications of this meant that my home wireless network was turned off and ports locked down to avoid ‘unauthorised access’. I had to have two telephone lines and broadband services (one for work and one for home) to enable corporate and home network access simultaneously – costly over-kill.
“It seems like someone has run an Ethernet connection 144 miles up the country and stuck me on the office network from home!”
I think the most irritating solution for me was a browser based VPN which meant that if I wanted to look at anything that I didn’t want going through the firewall for the most innocent browsing, be that William Hill for rugby updates to figleaves.com for Christmas presents (…honest), I was stopped by the firewall and had to go into my browser settings and turn off the proxy – much to the dismay of our network police.
Having recently changed jobs I have been presented with what I am starting to believe is the ultimate in home working technology. On my desk I have a little white box about the size of a deck of cards with some flashing lights and an antenna (see picture). It is plugged into my home router and it sets up a single point connection (with wireless) to my corporate network extending the office LAN and office wireless LAN into my home. My work laptop is connected to the work wireless and my VoIP phone is sat here as happy as Larry with my calls going over the SIP trunks out via the office! I have secure corporate access with my laptop connected to our office LAN without a VPN client – just as it works in the office. My wireless LAN at home is untouched and my family are still able to use the Internet. I can even meet with colleagues at home and they can log straight into the network too. My corporate access has the same SSID, same AD Authentication, same filtering, security and applications as I get in the office – absolutely no difference. Amazing!
It seems like someone has run an Ethernet connection 144 miles up the country and stuck me on the office network from home. Nothing has changed at home no one has any issues with our two SSIDs and our two VLANs to keep the XBOX away from Airtunes. Also, it seemingly self-configured once posted out from the office and requires nothing other than a power socket and a port on my router. Genius!
If we are to usefully enable home workers and ensure their productivity we need to ensure that the solutions provided are simple to install, reliable and provide as near an ‘in the office’ experience as possible. This little box of tricks certainly works on all of those levels as well as being secure and non-intrusive.
As Aruba Networks partners we often get involved in exciting wireless deployments and designs on a grand scale, but for me this solution is elegant, effective and hassle free and really shows technology as a business enabler at its best.
Thank you Mr Hodges. OK then back to me…
I was only joking about waking Mr Hodges up (Steve doesn’t sleep – ever), the man in the photo is a stunt double …and on this point I would also like to go on record to say that no animals were harmed in the writing of this article.