How Cisco IT provides remote access for small offices and telecommuters

By Networks Asia Editors | Oct 17, 2011

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With Cisco’s global presence, employees regularly need to collaborate across continents and time zones. Remote home access eases the employees’ burden of attending meetings outside of regular business hours.

Further, high-speed remote access enables them to perform almost all their work-related functions from home. For many employees, this translates to an additional 10% to 40% productivity per day. One noteworthy factor is that interruptions or phone calls could be less likely at home.

Remote access also offers employees the flexibility to work from home in an emergency, such as severe weather, outbreak or a disaster that prevents them from coming into the office. This provides an extra layer of resilience in keeping Cisco running under adverse conditions.

The categories of teleworkers at Cisco include:

• Full-time teleworkers who work from a fixed external site, usually their home
• Part-time teleworkers who telecommute a few days a week
• Part-time employees who work from home
• Day extenders who telecommute evenings or weekends
• Part-time teleworkers, including consultants, who telecommute because of specific projects

This case study describes how Cisco developed and deployed its Virtual Office solution and the business benefits that it gained. Cisco IT introduced a virtual private network (VPN) software solution for home-based remote access in 2001. This was adequate for most teleworkers but for those who required more sophisticated connectivity at home, the solution had limitations.

For example, teleworkers could only connect the device with the VPN client to the network. The network did not recognize other devices such as additional PCs, print servers, or printers. Neither did it support IP phones – a critical capability for home offices.

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