Technology beats the big freeze

The increasing availability of fast broadband means UK plc does not have to grind to a halt just because many people cannot make it into the office. Pic credit: Flickr: Alan D

With thousands of people across the UK unable to get to the office because of the freezing weather last week, experts are urging businesses to look more seriously at equipping staff so that they can work from home.

The severe weather has had a huge impact on productivity. The Federation of Small Businesses estimated that on Tuesday 5 January the economy lost £600m through absenteeism. But with a little IT planning and investment, even small firms should be able to ensure snowbound staff do not have to spend their working hours vegetating in front of daytime TV.

Julien St John-Dennis, head of business products at UK service provider ntl:Telewest Business, has been working from home regularly since joining the company in the early 1990s.

“Now that we are used to staff doing a bit of remote working, we expect it to be dependable,” he said. “If you go back a few years, homes did not have the fast broadband services or other devices including home PCs, laptops or smartphones, that they have now.”

Communicating with the office
Email is a mission-critical application for most organisations, and with Microsoft Outlook installed by default on many home PCs, configuring the software to hook up to a central Exchange mail server back at the office can be a simple task. For those running Lotus Notes, delivering messaging and calendaring to remote PCs is a simple matter of installing the small web-based iNotes client.

Where access to company email is difficult to arrange, at least at short notice, web-based email such as Hotmail or Googlemail provides a backup, with the advantage of integrated instant messaging (IM) enabling contact with colleagues using the same mail client.

Unified communications platforms from the likes of Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and Siemens Enterprise Communications make liaising with remote workers relatively straightforward. Aimed primarily at larger corporations, these plat forms provide manageable access to voice over IP (VoIP), voicemail, IM, white boarding and videoconferencing.

The cost and complexity of configuring unified communications platforms means that installing individual elements often offers better value. For example, a hosted VoIP service, which allows remote workers to keep the same fixed telephone number irrespective of the location at which they plug their IP handset or softphone into the internet, costs comparatively little.

Using mobile phones and call forwarding can avoid clashes between company and private telephone use, while IP bridging configured in a private cloud environment can provide additional telephony conferencing services.

“Part of [ensuring that remote working runs successfully] is good IT support, and thinking about, for example, how routers are configured with quality of service to make sure certain applications only use the right amount of bandwidth,” said Phil Bird, managing director of the PC Support Group, a company that provides support for home-working.

“Those are the sort of things that make a difference in terms of whether VoIP works or not.”

Similarly, the quality of video conferencing systems has improved significantly over the past few years, almost as much as the reliability of telecommunications last mile and backbone networks to deliver voice and video traffic. Good-quality videoconferencing equipment such as Logitech’s QuickCam Pro 9000 can be picked up for less than £90, while video-to-video calling, like audio conversations, remains free with software such as Skype, which is quick and easy to set up.

Ad hoc arrangements
While many of these technologies require prior investment in new hardware and software, there are also solutions available to organisations looking to set up ad hoc access to company systems in advance of installing more sophisticated longer-term remote working technology.

A terminal services client such as Logmein or GoToMyPC can provide a window onto an office PC that allows workers to use all the systems and applications installed on that office PC as normal.

All users need to do is download the appropriate software client onto their home PC, and for somebody else to do the same on their office computer.

Many of these software tools are free, but users have to pay for features such as file transfer between the two computers – though emailing them to web-based email accounts works just as well.

These tools can also be used by the IT department to remotely configure virtual private network (VPN) connections, email clients or other types of more secure remote access on users’ home PCs.

Security can often be an issue for many organisations, and one which a range of different remote access technologies can successfully address.

“If you are going to enable people to work remotely, you need to know who they are, and authentication is the key to any solution” said St John-Dennis, who highlights two factor authentication requiring a password, pin number and/or token as a preferred remote access method for remote users of corporate applications.

A common example would be Citrix Remote Access, which provides a terminal window into an application running on a central server. These are often easier for the organisation to control and secure but more complex and expensive to implement, while the applications themselves are often time sensitive and require particularly high speed broadband links at the user end to function efficiently.

Unless you count the chemistry of the human brain as a technical resource, the single biggest barrier to working from home is the mindset of managers employed at the organisation in question. There are always some situations that require somebody’s physical presence in an office, but the biggest obstacle to remote working is nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with attitude.

“There is a culture that needs to be there as well,” said St John-Dennis.