Mobility Solutions: Remote Access for Mobile Professionals - Part 1
Posted by Daryl Rinaldi on Mon, Apr 05, 2010 @ 04:27 PM
As a leading Boston area IT Support company we are often are asked to provide a way for our customers to remotely access their network. Remote access provides great flexibility to business owners and employees alike. People can work from on the road, can work from home when needed, can quickly look up information without having to wait until the next business day, and it provides a fall-back in the event that something makes your offices inaccessible (ex. construction, painting, natural disasters). It also allows you to support more employees without increasing office space. The flexibility to work at home can be a great incentive when hiring new employees as well.
The good news is that connecting to your network remotely is easier than ever before. There are many different methods you can use depending upon your needs and preferences. In this 3 part post we will cover the primary ways that businesses can setup remote access.
1. VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. Setting up a VPN, while easier than it used to be, still requires an IT technician. Your IT support department or company can configure a router that has VPN capability (GizmoFish prefers Sonicwall routers). This will provide a link into your internal network from the internet.
Let me explain how this works in principal. When you are inside your network your computer is attached directly to your network either wirelessly or via an ethernet (AKA network) cable. This allows you to access the network and any devices or network drives that you are allowed access to. When you are NOT in the office and you connect via a VPN it is just like you are physically connected to the network (like when you are in the office), but the connection is actually going over the internet. So you can think of it like there is a really long network cable stretching all the way from your office to your house.
You will need log in credentials to the VPN. The VPN router checks your credentials and then sets up and manages this virtual "tunnel" between your PC and the network. The VPN router can manage many of these connection simultaneously so that several people can be connected at the same time. The router encrypts all the traffic so even if someone were to intercept your traffic to and from the network they could not decipher it and therefore cannot steal any of your sensitive business information. Each user installs VPN software on their remote PC that they uses to log in to the VPN.
Pros and Cons
PRO: VPNs allow centralized control, monitoring, and management of remote access and can allow as many people to have access as your router and your internet bandwidth support. Once you have purchased the router with an appropriate number of VPN connections (some router charge based on the number of connections) there is no additional cost to allow more remote users.
CON: End users cannot setup VPNs by themselves -- An IT professional is usually required and VPNs can be tricky to configure and maintain. So if your VPN connection is not working correctly you usually require IT support to fix it. Also you must purchase a commercial grade VPN router with VPN licenses and you may need to install and maintain VPN software on everyone's PC that will be used for remote access. Also while end users can access data over the network, they cannot access applications. So if you do not have a particular program installed on your remote PC then you cannot run that program even though you may have access to the data. This limitation is not true with some other remote access technologies that we will cover later in this blog post series.
In subsequent posts we will discuss the other major ways of providing remote access to your network.