Remote Working (Virtual Private Networks VPN)

By Shakeel Rashid, Technical Services Engineer of Supreme Systems. For more information on our products and services please contact me on 0845 009 5430 or alternatively email me on shakeel.rashid@supremesystems.co.uk

What is Remote Working ?

Picture this scenario...you just got home from a busy day at the office,your manager calls
and asks for the new design ideas for the company ’s business card.You realise that you left
the designs at work and forgot to email them to him...here comes the clever bit...you open
your laptop and run a software which provides remote working support,in this case we ’ll
use Remote Desktop Connection which comes standard with the Windows line of operating
systems:

What you would normally do now is type in the IP address of the computer you want to connect to, your username and password and the domain to which your computer belongs i.e. just think of it as different departments within the same company so for example we may have Marketing or Sales or Research & Development. In this case we have an IP address of the server we want to connect to, a username, a password and the domain that my computer belongs to (in this case we have KLEENPOINT).

Once we have logged in just think of it as if you are sitting at your desk at work! You have access to all your files at work while you are at home!

How it Works

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Remote Working basically offers you a secure communications link over a public network to your organisations network. A VPN works by using the public internet to create ‘tunnels’ to send data through. The sending end encrypts data which is to be sent through the tunnel and decrypts that data at the receiving end. How does the receiving end know that the data coming through is secure you’re asking? Well, that’s simple; the receiving end knows when dodgy data has come through when the data is not encrypted. A hacker cannot even attempt to encrypt that data because only the sender and receiver know the method by which the data has been encrypted. This gets even more secure when the sending and receiving IP addresses are encrypted.

Think of encryption by reading the following scenario, you will hopefully understand:

Have you seen the film ‘Matrix’? If so, remember those green numbers and weird letters running down the screen? That in essence is data which has been encrypted. If you watch carefully Neo and a few other people know what those letters mean, why? Because they have the encryption key. In parts of the film they say ‘I see a blonde or a brunette’ (referring to women) when I look at these codes. We don’t know what these symbols mean because we don’t have that encryption key, just like unwanted data which might slip into the tunnel when you have a VPN connection setup.

Who are the Users of Remote Working?

The people who generally tend to use this technology are those people who carry out all their work in the field or those people who tend to work from home. For example a company called ABC windows Ltd might have three people who go to different parts of the city or even the country to sell windows to potential customers. These people would generally at the end of the working day or week upload all their data onto the companies’ server which is based at head office or even retrieve any data which is required, for example an updated contract which needs to given to new customers.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Remote Working

There are several advantages to using remote working. The first and most obvious being that you can work from home, eliminating the need to travel long distances to get to your office. Another beneficial factor is that it also dramatically reduces long distance call charges. This is because you are essentially using the internet to connect to your computer at the office. Even when it comes to supporting the remote working (VPN) connections, it is considerably cheaper because companies tend to outsource the supporting side of things to a third party company who specialise in this field. If a company has two offices then they will require a single dedicated line to connect the two offices together. This may seem reasonable at first but when the company starts growing in size then this becomes a problem. This is because dedicated lines are very expensive to maintain. This is where remote working and VPN’s come in. This technology avoids this scalability problem because in essence all you will be doing is tapping into the public internet and finding a route to your destination.

For every advantage there are unfortunately disadvantages. Engineers who will deploy the technology require a high level knowledge of network security and high level skill in analysis and troubleshooting in remote working. When a problem arises in a remote working environment, the engineers must keep their cool and stay focused as you may never know on the face where the problem is, whether it is at the server or the user end. Another potential disadvantage is that the traffic on the internet is hard or even impossible to predict, therefore users will most definitely get frustrated with the connection. However, the security which is provided in remote working usually outweighs the frustration with connection problems.

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