One of the most difficult challenges I face is providing consistent physical remote access routes for users, whether it be dial-up modem, broadband, leased line, or wireless . We have a number of remote users and these can be generally categorised as follows:

• Field Sales
• Home workers
• Teleworkers
• Remote Office

Taking the easier ones first, home workers I class as being onsite staff who also access the system from home – mostly in the evenings for email and occassional terminal service access. These are often dial-up or broadband users with their own services although some may have connections provided by us.

Teleworkers are those based primarily at home who visit the office infreqeuently. These are pretty much broadband users with larger connections managed by us.

Field Sales users work from home, the office, from public locations, or from business partner sites. These can use pretty much any connection that is available.

Remote Office staff can be either served by a central fixed VPN (such as a sonicwall TZ-170) such as the Florida office or each with their own VPN connection such as the Dallas Office. These are typically leased ine connections. We also have a remote office that is served by a fixed point to point wireless service.

At present we use a combination of AOL for dial-up at home and on the road, 256KB/s broadband for home works and 512KB/s (less contented) connections for teleworkers and leased line or fixed wireless service. We are currently also looking at BT Openzone and the Cloud for field based personnel to increase their potential coverage. Remote connections are a minefield for the SME, at least in my experience. As an SME we can’t afford the huge MPLS or Frame Relay connections that the larger corporations take advantage of so we are faced with a sea of competing products and solutions often rebadged/rebranded and offered with vast ranges of price plans and service options.

Whilst at the Boxing Orange seminar, one of the brief half-hour talks was on iPass. From the blurb I wasn’t expecting much from this as I particularly went to the briefing for the two-factor authentication and SSO solution. However, when I heard the speaker talk about iPass in connection with BT Openzone and The Cloud my interesting perked up.

Peapod have some inforrmation about the iPass/Openzone conection, here.

The general idea of iPass seems to be that the client machine (XP, MAC, Windows Mobile, Symbian Nokia) is installed with a universal client which handles all the connections that are available to the client, be they modem, isdn, broadband or wireless options.

The user can then choose, based upon their location, the most suitable connection for them (using Single-Sign On). The interesting thing here is that when a user selects a location, they can bring up a list of all locations and, from the demo I saw at least, can pull up the actual address of these places. So for example, if a Costa Coffee or McDonalds is nearby then the address can be pulled up – feed this into the Satnav – and you’re off connecting.

According to ZDNet, iPass also has agreements with service providers such as BT Openzone, The Cloud, and T-Mobile amongst others.

I can’t believe I’m about to use the word, but yes here it comes. This iPass client appears to offer a real Unified method for connecting to networks, thus making it much simpler for users to connect to a network. In iPass’ own words ‘iPassConnect delivers a one-click connection process that includes login to the Windows desktop, access network, VPN and enterprise network‘.

The RoamServer technology is a system that installs on your own network and allows the single-sign on technology to control access permissions. I am assuming this is for client-side VPN authentication.

iPass is certainly something I will be looking into further as I’m interested obviously in the cost models. Is it a pay as you use service or a fixed monthly fee service?

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