one are the days of traditional office workers tied to their desktop PCs, ready to clock in their typical eight-hour workdays. For better or worse, the shift from the predominantly deskbound workforces to enterprises full of roving employees is a budding reality. The future of workforce mobility belongs to those who will log their hours when they want, how they want, and, most importantly, where they want.

As such, mobility is becoming more of a lifestyle in the enterprise world, driven by workers who are no longer tied to a physical desk in the office. Full-time teleworkers, road warriors, day extenders, and extranet partners all need timely, secure remote access to specific data on the corporate network. According to an IDC October 2006 research report, the total United States mobile population passed 100 million in 2005, and millions more are working outside the office every year. In fact, IDC projects that by 2009, there will be more than 878 million mobile workers worldwide, demonstrating that mobility is going mainstream.

However, debate continues to rage within the IT industry on what “mobility” really means. Too many IT decision makers think that mobility is merely a function of this or that technology. It’s time to put this debate to rest. Set technology aside and, instead, evaluate the end users’ mobile lifestyles.

A matter of choice
Many remote workers fit into multiple mobility profiles, depending on business and lifestyle requirements: whether they are working from home, on the road, and/or from business partner locations. Therefore, choosing which remote access technology to deploy should be defined by the unique requirements and lifestyles of the end users. The lifestyles of mobile users can be categorized and used to guide the choice for the relevant type of remote access deployment in your organization:

Full-time teleworkers
Full-time teleworkers are heavy users of remote access technology, for example, system administrators and engineers. These types of users are typically IPSec VPN users because of two important characteristics. First, they are most likely using specific non-Web applications as part of their work. Second, their work environments are probably owned and managed by their organizations.

Road warriors
Road warriors such as sales persons or managers are highly mobile employees. They can choose IPSec VPN, SSL VPN, or both technologies. For mobile workers using laptops owned by their organizations, IPSec VPN is a good solution because it is a managed environment, and many IPSec clients include security software such as personal firewalls. However, in some cases, SSL VPN may be a

complementary access choice. For example, road warriors have access to public computers like hotel business center PCs or Internet kiosks. These unmanaged environments make SSL VPN a good fit for email and intranet access, but they will not allow client-server applications because client software cannot—and will not—be installed on unmanaged PCs. In addition, road warriors may also access email and business applications from smartphones and PDAs. In this case, a mobile VPN solution would be ideal for connecting road warriors to critical applications.

Day extenders
Day extenders are light users of remote access technology, accessing the network for perhaps an extra hour from home or another hour on the weekend from a home computer or even a mobile device. Day extenders are a good fit for SSL VPN or mobile VPN technology. A home computer or mobile device is a partially managed environment and not publicly accessible to everyone. However, it is managed by the employee, not the organization. The remote PC or mobile device may or may not have security software such as firewall or antivirus. An organization may want to consider how much access to allow for these users. For example, you can allow more access if the request comes from a PC with a personal firewall, but only provide restricted access from a PC with no personal firewall. An important thing to consider in this case is the fact that SSL VPN vendors provide different security measures in SSL VPN products. Therefore, part of the decision should be made based on the security that can be ensured by the SSL VPN solution.

Extranet partners and on-site workers
Another example of an organization not controlling the computing environment is when workers of partner companies utilize an extranet Web portal to access information sharing resources or Web applications. In this case, the partner workers are accessing information from PCs not controlled by the organization. A similar example is onsite workers such as consultants and contractors. These personnel often work off their own PCs but need to access your network. SSL VPN is a good way to provide secure access to information without requiring client software on non-employee PCs.

Summary
In summary, the mobile workforce lifestyle is blossoming of its own accord, driven more by remote worker behavior rather than by remote access technology. More often than not, organizations think of mobility in terms of a particular type of technology. They constantly debate over technical details of which transport encryption protocols are “better” and subsequently overlook the most significant deciding factor among various remote access methods—the way in which users prefer to get their access. So if your organization is in need of a remote access solution, the question is not which remote access technology to use but rather what remote access solution best fits your users’ lifestyles.

Check Point secure remote access solutions
Check Point provides a range of secure remote access solutions to fit the mobile lifestyle needs of a diversity of users. Whether your users are full-time teleworkers, road warriors, day extenders, or extranet partners, Check Point delivers the most comprehensive secure remote access solutions to meet the needs of today’s mobile lifestyles.

For more information, visit the Secure Remote Access Solutions page.