By Nigel Davies, Technical Director, PSU IT Voice and Data Ltd.

Remote working is moving up every organisation’s agenda. In part, it’s in response to the government’s Flexible Working Regulations 2002, but it’s also a reflection of the increasing realisation that remote working represents an opportunity to offer staff a better work/life balance.

At least one third of office space costs can be cut through remote working. It’s these hard benefits that catch the eye of the board members. The soft benefits, such as increased productivity and the scope to employ staff who live outside commuting range are trickier to measure but are often overlooked.

Adoption of technologies that are highly supportive of remote working – such as broadband and voice over IP – is rising sharply. Figures show that one in five companies currently use VoIP for remote working and 79% expect to be doing so by 2006. Broadband has been a real driver and is now experiencing a ‘more for less’ transformation where 1, 2 and even 4MB circuits can now be rented for less than the original slower circuits. Remember that any broadband circuit above 512KB is more than adequate for a single worker to work productively.

The bandwidth for an acceptable voice call will rarely use more than 18K. That leaves more than enough bandwidth to run applications over the link such as e mail and web browsing.

Of course along with this silver lining comes some clouds. There’s more to this exercise than just rushing down to PC World to buy a broadband router. Remote staff will need access to company data and subsequently you find yourself opening a door to the outside world that will need to be protected. Remember that your network is only as secure as the sum of its parts; hence an unprotected PC connected to your VPN may start off as a pea sized hole in the dyke, but can soon attract the attention of the less scrupulous.

A personal computer connected to the Internet without a firewall can be hijacked in just a few minutes. The only way to make the computer 100% secure is to turn it off or disconnect it from the Internet. The real issue is how to make the computer 99% secure when it is connected. Lapsing back into an analogy, if you think of a personal firewall as a doorman, you will need other doormen around to help deal with other threats such as spyware, key loggers, browser hijackers, viruses, trojans, worms, phishing, spam and hybrids thereof. This becomes even more essential if the router provides wireless support as the threat could be within 100 feet rather than 10,000 miles.

A layered approach is best to protect your security and privacy:

First line of defense -- Choose an Internet service provider or an email service that offers online (server side) virus, spam and content filters, eg Message Labs.

Second line of defense -- Install a wired or wireless hardware router with a built in firewall between the modem and the computer or network. If the user is working with a wireless laptop, lock the router down to only accept access from the laptop MAC address hence barring roaming outsiders. Also use WEP encryption and hide the SSID of the network to further enhance security.

Third line of defense – Install a personal firewall (SP2 for XP now contains a built-in version), anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-Trojan, anti-spam, anti-phishing, and privacy software.

Of course this is fine in principle, but will the user be able to understand them all. It may be easier to provide a remote worker with a laptop, router and IP phone that has been set-up to provide them with the applications they need. Behind this you will have updated the Windows files, installed the antivirus software (either a standalone or a client of your corporate package) and have made sure that the definition database is updated and set to automatically update when it sees a new definition file.

You will have enabled the firewall, locked it down and set any exception rules, of course remembering that on SP2 the firewall comes enabled by default and will cause problems if it tries to run alongside a third party soft firewall. Finally check the firewall’s impenetrability by using one of the online testing services. Although there are some good individual packages to address each of the threats mentioned above, many of the bigger developers now offer all in one packages that have performed well in tests.

The support effort required post delivery is dramatically reduced if you hand a machine to a user that has been completely set up ready for them to just plug in and get to work. If the VoIP phone has also been set with the correct DHCP settings and targeted at the IP address of the Voice Switch then all the user has to do is plug everything in and follow some simple instructions to set the router to point at their ISP (and current routers have remarkably clever self install wizards now) before they are ready to operate effectively.

Growing in popularity, but harder to setup initially, is the use of a secure Web portal that gives access to a Terminal Server or Citrix session where specific applications are published for the user. Bandwidth requirements are vastly reduced, security is enhanced and all the user needs is an Internet connection, which could be a PDA, Blackberry, laptop or home PC.

Hopefully you will have placed a shortcut on their desktop which will launch the VPN to the office so enabling the user to send and receive e mails to their hearts content whilst you sit back in the knowledge that you’ve plugged the dyke and surrounded their door with bouncers.

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