Scenario 2: Enable working from home

The concept of working from home is very much there in other countries, but

hasn't really been an appealing proposition for Indian enterprises till now.

There are many reasons for this, both technical and HR related.

Technically, there would be connectivity issues when employees need to access

the enterprise netowrk from home. Their home connectivity would vary by type,

bandwidth, service provider, etc. At the enterprise end, the organization would

have to provide access into the network, for which a VPN would need to be in

place, security would need to be strenghtened, and bandwidth would have to be

optimized to ensure low-latency and high performance connects.

Moreover, the costs of the same would have to be kept low, considering that

there's a slowdown, and we're exploring this possibility to save costs and not

increase them.

On the HR side, performance metrics would have to be defined to ensure that

the employees deliver even if they're not coming to the office. The IT

department can't do much about HR issues, but can certainly keep the IT

infrastrucutre ready. Given the current ecnomic slowdown, it might be a good

idea as it would lead to cost saving and even help the environment by reducing

employee travel.

We tested this concept by deploying a WAN accelerator between our homes and

the office. We setup a VPN server in the office and tried to see the

effectiveness of the whole setup.

How we deployed



We setup a VPN server on Fedora 10, using OpenVPN (both of which are free), and
placed it behind a WAN accelerator (which is paid of course). You can find out

how to deploy OpenVPN and VPN on Windows Server 2008 elsewhere in the cover

story. We then connected the WAN accelerator to a switch and also connected a

mobile controller, which takes care of licenses of mobile users to the same

switch. After that, we connected the WAN accelerator and mobile device to a WAN

emulator whose bandwidth was set at 512 Kb/s. This emulated the speed of a user

sitting at home and connecting to the VPN server over a 512Kb/s bandwidth. We

then installed a software provided by the WAN accelerator mobile controller on

the client machine. The client software automatically connected to the WAN

accelerator and established an optimized link. The WAN accelerator helped reduce

bandwidth usage from 512 Kb/s to just 128 Kb/s. With the help of OpenVPN client

we connected to the VPN server, deployed within the organization.

Setup of users connecting to the corporate network from home. We used Network Nightmare for simulating the WAN conditions.

The Benefits



The same setup could be done without the WAN accelerator and the enterprise
would save some costs. However, the user would require higher bandwidth to

connect, which would be a cause for not using the enterprise network. With the

WAN accelerator in between, lesser bandwidth is required. So, users could go for

lower Internet connection plans at home and spend less. Or even the organization

could bear the cost of this connectivity, and would have to pay for a lower

bandwidth plan.