Today’s enterprise is increasingly becoming a distributed workplace made up of branch offices, telecommuters, after-hour workers, contractors, business partners and mobile employees. Demand for remote access to enterprise network resources is being driven by a number of business trends. Employees are demanding flexible work arrangements. Companies are being driven to improve productivity and reduce costs. Business partners want real-time access to critical information.

The rise in teleworking is well documented. A Gartner Group study predicts more than 137 million workers worldwide will be involved in some sort of remote work by 2003. Also accelerating the distributed organization is the rapid adoption of affordable, widely available broadband Internet access. Internet users with broadband access will triple from 7% to 21% to 25 million users by 2003 and VPN expenditures will increase 529% by 2004 (Infonetics Research). Last year a government Labour Force Survey* showed that as much as 6% of the UK working population, equivalent to 1.5 million people, work for their employer or client via a remote link.


Yet security remains an issue. A joint report from the DTI and PricewaterhouseCoopers released earlier this year shows 44% of UK businesses suffered at least one malicious security breach in the past year. Many in the industry fear that the move towards teleworking and the corresponding change of the enterprise network from a closed, protected architecture to an open, Internet-based system leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

For example, how can companies prevent non-secure home networks from compromising their corporate networks? What can be done to protect remote workers against the constant threat of new viruses and worms? What is the best way to expand the telecommuting network without opening new security holes? How can they successfully manage a diversified, constantly changing telecommuting workforce? Finally, and perhaps most important of all, How do companies retain control over a network of widely distributed remote access points?