The rapid growth of consumer and business technologies has forever changed the traditional workplace. The introduction of computers and the Internet increased employee efficiency and productivity. Desktop computers were an important part of this new productivity, but they were expensive and were used only at the corporate office. When prices came down and people were able to purchase them for home use, more people began bringing work home. They used media such as floppy diskettes to transfer data between computers. Over time, computers got smaller and more portable. Laptops quickly became available to the majority of corporate employees. Dial-up access allowed employees to connect to the corporate network remotely. Eventually, new connectivity options such as virtual private networking, high-speed Wi-Fi, and mobile broadband replaced dial-up as the primary means of accessing networks remotely.
Today, armed with a laptop and anytime, anywhere access, many people no longer have to face a long commute to work. You can work from home, in an airport, in a coffee shop, or from your car between appointments. This capability has been highly beneficial to sales representatives, field engineers, consultants, and installation and repair engineers. For example, a sales representative no longer needs to return to the office to update the sales manager on a sales deal. Instead, the sales rep can handle status updates remotely and move on to the next customer. More and more, sales representatives can be based anywhere the customer is located, even working within a customer site, and feel confident that confidential data are not being shared with or seen by the customer. Organizations foster this confidence by deploying secure remote access technologies. You will read about a variety of these technologies in this chapter.
Implementing a system that provides anytime, anywhere access is critical for a growing mobile work force. Organizations must consider the following factors when planning a remote access environment: