Supporting mobile workers everywhere

 The coronavirus lockdown has made everyone a mobile worker. IT strategies and policies relating to mobile working, laptops, security and mobile network access have had to scale across every business. Approaches that have worked well in the past, when a small proportion of employees needed mobile connectivity, have often proved lacking when IT departments try to scale up remote working to support the majority of employees.

For years, IT departments have relied on virtual private networks (VPNs) to provide remote access to the corporate network for remote workers. But when measures to contain the coronavirus resulted in many businesses switching from office-based work to remote working, every employee became a mobile worker and computer engineering vs computer science proved woefully inadequate.

Along with providing secure networking, IT managers have also needed to consider how to deliver access to line-of-business applications to employees to enable them to work from home long term.

While a VPN provides a secure point-to-point connection between a remote worker’s device and the corporate network, it does not offer direct access to any cloud-based applications. Every single packet of network traffic needs to be routed through the VPN servers, which makes connectivity to internet-hosted business applications very inefficient.