Remote access: best practice

How do you efficiently and securely allow workers to access resources from wherever they happen to be? Steve Cassidy explores the different approaches and philosophies

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The idea of remote access throws up all sorts of security and confidentiality concerns, especially since it’s now not just a special dispensation for techie and jet-setting CEOs, but standard operating procedure for staff at all levels. Everybody has been obliged to at least try it out, whether they're working from home or administering remote infrastructure and hardware. The market in remote-access servi ces, products and architecturesis absolutely heaving with offering s. With so many options and scenarios to think about, businesses naturally want to follow best practice, but what does that mean? Of course it’ est “best practice” to find the right balance between security, costand complexity, but what that looks like in reality will depend on the size of the company.

The fact is, there's no award or prize to tell the world you really know your remote-access onions. The measure of best practice is all about the non-technical results of your specific implementation. Do you fin d yourself unduly restricted in daily operations? Are workers having to wait in queues or negotiate with others in order to get connected and get work done? How are your costs comparing to those of your competitors?

In a way, it’s freeing to know that you don’t need to meet some arbitrary criteria. So, with the understandin g that we're not going to uncover a one-size-fits-all standard, let’s look at a few facts of remote-access life and consider how to best deal with them. Having said that, if you do want to use a service that doesn’t interoperate nicely with your existing setup, you could elect to get a separate internet connection that meets its requirements and run the two pipelines in parallel. What’s definitely not best practice is undertaking a root-and-branch reconfiguration of every box in your factory with an LED on it just to meet the arbitrary architectural demands of one piece of software.

IPv6? Don’t hold your breath