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VPN remote access
Brand marketing company saves thousands by improving the speed of access for its remote workers and providing focussed training and support
Background
This UK division of a multi-national wine and spirits company has a sales management workforce of some 60 home-based workers.
To improve efficiency and communications the company has provided laptop PCs to these users and implemented a head office server-based shared document storage system and email using Microsoft Exchange.
The Problem
The remote workers were using an ordinary modem and dialling-up the office systems over an ordinary phone link.
The commercial director was receiving several emails each week from members of this team complaining about the very slow speed of access and constant failures of the links resulting in frustration and lost productivity. Some people we resorting to driving two hours to the office and back again to do a couple of hours work. This was more productive than trying to use the systems remotely for six hours! It was when he was shown the telephone bills running to thousands of pounds each month that he finally called for my help.
The Causes and Solutions
I carried out a research project to ascertain the cause of the difficulties and also to investigate cost effective alternatives to the modem dial-up. There were three key findings from this work:
- Replacing the direct-to-the-office modem dial-up with a broadband or ISDN based secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) would increase access speeds and drastically reduce costs.
The cost of implementing the VPN across the 60 people was around £16,000 including hardware, service set-up and installation/configuration. The ongoing monthly savings for telephone/Internet charges was £14,000. This project paid for itself in 5 weeks and continues to save £14,000 per month from the previous position. For those with broadband access, the speed of data access was increased by a factor of around 20.
- There was a fundamental incompatibility issue with the shared file server in head office, which meant that the speed of access to its information was under 10% of what it should have been.
Resolution necessitated replacing an aging file server with one running Microsoft Windows 2003. The performance increase has been measured at 10-15 times of that previously, so coupled with the broadband VPN implementation, access to the company's shared files has been increased by up to 300 times. An email received from the IT department after this work reads "…Just to say a massive thanks for all your efforts, tuition and advice with the network server. We've had good feedback from our users already and I'm very pleased with the way the whole job went…."
- The level of training in the use of key software, particular the specific aspects of using Outlook for email as a remote worker was pitifully low. This meant that many people were using the software in a way that was prone to poor performance and failures.
I was able to share my 12 years experience as a Systems Manager supporting 40 remote workers and 8 years as a remote worker myself. Training sessions were provided in both group sessions in Head Office as well as one to one sessions at home with senior managers.
If your business needs this type of help and support, please contact us.
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