Remote Access : Case Study

This company had invested considerably in its head office network. A rack of Compaq and HP servers supported the Microsoft Windows Server based network providing file and print and Exchange Server services. Also, a new database system had been implemented to manage the core operation of trainee progress management.

The basic network switch hardware had been replaced with high speed 100Mb switches on a gigabit backbone, which provided ample network bandwidth across the office. In fact the head office users had pretty much all the information they needed at their fingertips.

While this was good news for the head office users, it served to highlight the fact that the community of nearly a hundred field based trainee supervisors could probably be better supported by technology. Supplied only with a mobile phone, the fieldworkers had to phone into head office for any central contact and to find out if there had been any changes to their work schedules for the week, If any information on a particular trainee was required, the fieldworker had to phone into the office and ask someone to lookup the details for them on the database. Management were concerned that not only was this an inefficient working practice compared with what was possible at head office, but that it also made it much harder to disseminate information to the field based workforce, which could lead to feelings of isolation and a general lack of identification with what was happening throughout the company.

In order to alleviate this problem, the company issued laptops to each of the fieldworkers and a high speed broadband Internet connection was installed at each user’s house. A mobile VPN client was installed on each of the laptops so that they could access the head office network over the Internet through the head office BorderWare firewall. Given the number of users who were likely to require access to the head office at any one time and the bandwidth limitations of this form of connection, this company used Citrix to provide the bandwidth efficient access to head office that the users would need. Several servers were installed with Citrix, so that even though a large proportion of the fieldworkers accessed the network at the same time (as was expected at the start and end of day), the system would still be able to provide acceptable levels of performance.

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