Remote access is all about giving your staff access to the information
and services they need. Whether your business has one office or many
offices around Australia or the world, remote access technologies can
connect your people to your information. There are many different
technologies and solutions which form part of Kiandra’s remote access
strategies – from pure connectivity solutions connecting offices, to
secure authentication mechanisms to control access into your network
from the internet, and to the intelligent sharing of data and
applications depending on location, user and access method.
How Kiandra delivers remote access
Broadly speaking, we break down remote access strategies into two
main considerations; how do I connect to the infrastructure, and what
do I get access to once I’m connected?
How do I connect? In the case of head office / branch office
connectivity we may implement a broadband point-to-point or
point-to-multipoint service to allow data to travel between the sites.
This can be the same for users who wish to work from home, except in
this case we would typically use a home internet service (ADSL etc) to
connect to the office. In the case of a remote worker who needs to connect to the business network while on the road, we may use a mobile broadband solution such as Telstra NextG mobile broadband with a secure authentication technology such as RSA SecurID two-factor authentication to grant secure access to sensitive business data. Or, we can use Citrix Access Gateway for secure access to network resources from the internet (using Secure Sockets Layers, or SSL technologies), without using traditional virtual private networks (VPNs) which present security risks.
What do I get access to? This depends entirely on what the business needs to do and what’s been set up inside the network. If the business needs to share access to files between offices, then it may be appropriate to implement a centralised solution and share the data and applications from a server or servers in that location. To do this we’d use application virtualisation technologies like Citrix XenApp or Microsoft Terminal Services to efficiently deliver applications to remote users. This is called server-based computing.
Or the nature of the business may lend itself more suited to a distributed model, and instead of centralising data, we synchronise it between sites perhaps using a technologies built into Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 known as Distributed File Services (DFS). DFS is useful in this model as it provides fast access for each user when normal conditions prevail, and allows for automatic failover to available resources if one node in the DFS environment fails (such as a local server failure – in this case, the DFS infrastructure would fail over to the next available site).
Access to email and internal websites such as intranets and Microsoft SharePoint sites is generally easy to provide using built-in technologies.
Remote access experience and certifications
Kiandra has significant experience in analysing remote access
requirements and in the design and implementation the necessary
infrastructure and solutions to support businesses of all sizes; from
single work-from-home scenarios, to large multi-site national
businesses with diverse application and access requirements. Flexible
and secure mobile solutions can also be implemented, further extending
the reach of your business and improving worker efficiencies.