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:

• Do remote workers need access from various locations, such as hotels, airports, customer sites, coffee shops, and so on?
• Will network access be granted only to employer-owned computer resources or will employees be allowed access when using personal, customer-owned, or publicly available resources as well?
• Will every employee be allowed to have a laptop for remote access? How will the data on the laptop be protected if it’s lost or stolen?
• Do employees need to use mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets? Do they need to access the organization’s network with these devices?
• How will remote employees access organizational resources? Will virtual private network (VPN) access be required, or will web access to the organization’s resources be sufficient?
• What level of authentication will be required for remote access?