The new world order of working from home

Thanks to the growing ubiquity of residential high-speed internet access combined with an abundance of enterprise-grade communications and collaborations technologies, the global workforce is better equipped than ever to adapt to these unpredictable, changing circumstances. With a combination of broadband, Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony and Virtual Private Network (VPN) access; working from home is feasible, but practical enablement is only half the challenge. There are several issues that organisations must contend with if they are to successfully transition to a remote work paradigm.

Broadband conundrum

The first issue is connectivity. Although over 97% of UK households have access to broadband internet, the quality of these services does vary. Although cable and fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) has ample bandwidth, in rural areas or in residential properties that are served by ADSL connections that are distant from the nearest exchange, gaining an internet connection suitable for tasks such as video calls, or obtaining seamless access to remote applications can become a major challenge.

Part of the issue is simply raw bandwidth, but another issue is prioritisation of that raw resource. Basic ISP supplied connectivity equipment is not set up by default to prioritise certain types of traffic. In a residential environment where a household may have a home worker in one room while the rest of the occupants are streaming from Netflix, playing online games or uploading to social media, the competing household traffic presents a real threat to a worker’s connectivity, and therefore productivity. Considering that a Netflix video stream can consume anywhere between 4Mbps and 12Mbps of data (for a 4K movie), it is inevitable that many homeworkers will be impacted by poor internet performance at certain times in the day.

In the corporate office setting, IT has tools to control the network environment and ensure network performance and quality of experience for their employees and business applications. Many organisations use software-defined wide area networking technologies (SD-WAN) to control and prioritise business traffic flowing across their respective local and wide area networks. However, historically IT has not been able to extend this control and prioritisation over an employee’s home network environment. With the recent shift to a global remote workforce, businesses have started to use SD-WAN in the home worker space.

How is SD-WAN delivered at home?

To help businesses gain control over the home network environment, a few SD-WAN providers have developed solutions that essentially turn the home office into a software-defined site on the business network. In simple terms, home office SD-WAN is a small software app that sits on the home worker’s computer, or potentially resides as a separate appliance that connects to the home router / modem to act as a network monitor and traffic flow controller. These software or hardware devices are

remotely managed by the business and have a set of policies that control which types of network traffic should receive priority, and what should be slowed or even blocked depending on criteria such as traffic type, which device its originating from, or what application is making the request.

Naturally, personal privacy of home workers must be respected. In most cases, it would be unlawful for an employer to track what websites an employee accesses over their home network. So a key requirement of the home office SD-WAN is to only manage application traffic that is crossing the business’s VPN, or accessing corporate applications, for example an ERP system, booking system - or even cloud-based applications such as Salesforce or Office 365.

Going mobile

Although SD-WAN can help organisations better manage remote workers, there is still the issue of residential areas that have limited internet connectivity, whether due to geography, residential over-booking, etc. To solve this challenge, some organisations are looking at sending out wireless access points that utilise mobile networks instead (4G, 5G, LTE). In this scenario, each home worker is posted a preconfigured wireless access point and modem that are preconfigured and ready to connect to an operator such as 02, EE or Vodafone. In this setup, home workers use a software Virtual Private Network (VPN) client that routes all business-related traffic over the business mobile network. This option has the advantage of being more secure and immune to traffic overload from the rest of the household but incurs a potentially slightly higher ongoing monthly cost for data – and mobile network coverage can vary. In some cases, these modems are used alongside household broadband as a failover device if bandwidth drops too low on the household internet connection.

Although many of the changes needed for successful home working are focused on the employee end, there are several considerations at the corporate data centre side. The main issue is that there are potentially a lot more inbound connections – or connections that are passing through the core for security validation purposes – that may well then leave the data centre to connect an authenticated user with an external resource that is in the cloud.

Data centre changes

Many network managers are now in the process of reengineering network topologies to move away from the centralised model of large pools of office workers to distributed sites. This is another area where application intelligence combined with SD-WAN technologies can help to manage the flows based on prioritisation. For example, certain types of use cases such as voice over IP (VoIP) or workers accessing a critical CRM tool may gain access priority and bandwidth allocation versus another employee that is doing a scheduled, end of night data back-up. In this scenario, the backup is not stopped but merely given less bandwidth. An organisation can set up incredibly granular rules depending on user, application, time of day, available capacity and what types of connectivity are available to meet business priorities and ensure consistent application performance.

Updated policies

Some of these changes will potentially blur the line between personal space and business obligation imposed on workers in a residential setting. However, all the technologies described including SD-WAN, VPN and wireless access points can all be configured in such a way that the privacy of home workers is not impacted. Organisations need to update their internet usage guidelines to reflect changes as well as educating staff on what usage data is being collected for operational purposes.

With transparency on the part of employers and a recognition from employees that home working requires a certain level of corporate oversight and governance, the new world order of remote work could unlock a better work-life balance for future generations.