Remote Access: Telecommuting and the Branch Office

Telecommuting

StarLAN Consulting Services has assisted many who have chosen to improve their quality of life by telecommuting to work. As gas prices rise, and as a growing number of companies recognize the benefits of a remote workforce, telecommuting - the ability to connect to and to participate in a remote network - has become a real option for more and more people. It is also increasingly the case that you have to go to where the business is - and means  a mobile workforce that can still connect to vital company information resources in real time while on the go. So whether you're travelling or working from home, there are a wide variety of solutions that can be applied to your remote access needs.

Branch Office

Another Reason to Telecommute

Expanding businesses must sooner or later address the issues surrounding branch office connectivity. Your workers at your branch office need access to the same  things as those in the main office: network resources such as commonly used files, line-of-business applications such as accounting packages or other industry-specific applications and/or any other resources used for collaboration or information management. If your aim is to ensure that your branch office locations have timely access to vital company info, then you've got to look at what it takes to accomplish this. So the question becomes: how do we deliver these resources to a remote location? 

If you're trying to connect a branch office with several workers, then there are other considerations. For example, how much effective bandwidth per worker do you really need? If you want to use IP telephony, that raises the stakes considerably, because not only must your broadband connection at each end have sufficient bandwidth to handle both voice and data, you must also be able to prioritize the traffic over those connections. In other words, you don't want your phone calls going 'choppy' or garbled because someone is downloading a YouTube video on the same network.

First Things First: You Need a Decent Broadband Connection

But there's a catch. Whether you're a telecommuter or whether you have one or more branch offices, you need a reliable, high-speed, low latency broadband connection in order to connect effectively and reliably. Many of the enabling technologies - IPSec VPNs, SSL VPNs, RDP (Microsoft Desktop Remote Protocol), Citrix Metaframe clients, etc. - require substantially better than a dial-up connection in order to work well, or even to work at all. So if your dream is to move to a ranch in the country and raise horses while you continue to work at your job, then you may have a problem: dial-up (and crummy dial-up at that) is most likely all you're going to get in the way of service. The newer cellular broadband services aren't what they're cracked up to be, especially in rural areas. Satellite-based internet service would seem to be the way to go - in fact it's the only way to go if you can't get broadband service by any other means.  For an overview of wireless broadband technologies, click here.

What Won't Work

But there's another catch. None - let me say it again: none of the three providers of residential- or consumer-class satellite-based internet access will work with one of the most common technologies (IPSec VPNs, to be specific) that many large companies use to provide secure access to their corporate networks. Some SSL-based VPN's will work with some residential-class systems, but it's really a crapshoot, and none of the residential satellite service providers will directly support them. It's worth noting, however, that UltraVNC, Citrix Metaframe clients and Microsoft's Remote Desktop work very well with StarBand's new Nova service.

Let's clarify this: if your workplace requires the use of an IPSec-based VPN or any of the alphabet soup of technologies referenced here, then most residential-class satellite-based internet services simply won't do. Because they either won't work well or work at all. Visit Satellite ISPs Compared and also the  Intro to Satellite ISP service on this website for more information on this subject.

What WILL Work

There is another class of satellite-based internet service providers that will work with ALL VPNs and other remote access technologies. Business- and enterprise-class satellite internet service providers operate with different equipment and on different network architectures designed specifically for remote access and other mature communications protocols.  StarLAN Consulting Services represents and installs BroadSky Networks'  LinkStar  and iDirect VSAT systems. These are no-frills services, but they are fast, have a  vanishingly low contention factor, and are hugely transparent to the sort of communication protocols required by remote access technologies. In other words, they'll get you where you need to go.