Support Remote Workers Tips

Remote Network Administration Can Be Dangerous

While remote network administration can be a great convenience to your IT staff, it should be used with great trepidation as remote network administration constitutes a large security hole. If admin access is restricted locally, only people physically on site have the ability to change the network settings of the LAN that protect your mission critical data, but if the network can be administered remotely then it is very possible that a talented hacker could break in and start using your company LAN for nefarious purposes that we don't want to being to discuss here. So unless there is a strong reason to allow for remote network administration, such as to support remote workers in the form of brilliant system administrators who simply cannot be on site very often (though even that I would say isn't reason to risk the potential security problem), don't allow your network to be administered remotely.

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Outsource Your Helpdesk

In today's go go go world, business never stops, and if you want to stay competitive you must enable your workers to work whenever they can. What that means is that if, at 2am in a hotel room 1000 miles away on a business trip your employee's computer starts going crazy, you must have some way in place to support remote workers, or his presentation to a key client might go pretty badly the next day. Clearly, not all organizations have the man-power to have their own 24/7 self-hosted helpdesk for remote workers to dial into, but it may be worth your money to outsource your helpdesk needs to India as there are very good IT companies over there who are willing to make a deal to provide such general IT support to your employees for a modest fee. If your organization wants to stay competitive and has many mobile employees, it is important to consider investing in such a solution.

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Simple, Secure, Instant VPN

Finding that your growing organization has reached a point where it needs to support remote workers with secure access to network resources such as email, company shared files, intranet, and internal web applications? Then you need to make your local LAN accessible by a secured VPN.

While you can use big iron, complex secure gateway solutions to allow remote workers to access your network, chances are that you don't need that much bandwidth or power and can therefore get away with a small, easy to install SSL VPN appliance, such as SonicWall's SSL-VPN solutions.

You can simply place the SSL-VPN box at the physical entrance to your intranet, perform an easy, graphical configuration, install simple client software on the computers of your remote workers, and you'll be all set! All information in your LAN will be accessible to workers on the road through an encrypted, secure, reliable channel, and all very affordably.

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Mobile Workers Save Office Space

Are you wasting a lot of office space on workers doing data entry? With internet and computers in most homes, you could make your employees happy and save money on office space by “outsourcing” work to people's home offices and requiring them to come in only a couple times a week to touch base. To properly support these remote workers, you must provide them with remote data entry technology and probably setup a VPN for your company's computing assets if one is not already in place. Both of these things can be done relatively cheaply, especially compared to the cost of paying rent on space in which to put a few, unnecessary desks with workers who don't really need to be any particular place to do their jobs.

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