Firms neglect mobile corporate network access, survey reveals
By Chris Taylor
24/05/2011
Just two per cent of firms are using VPN remote access to allow staff to work from home, according to a Virgin Media Business survey.
This leaves the overwhelming majority of firms in the dark when it comes to having a 'mobile' or work-from-home work strategy - despite more businesses claiming to support home and flexible working practices.
Virgin polled 5,000 companies and over half (64 per cent) of these said that they were now equipping employees to work out of the office with technology such as VPN connections. Just one year ago this figure was only 14 per cent.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a secure way of connecting to the corporate network at work from a remote location, using the Internet or any public network to transport network data privately, using encryption. This connection is often supported by remote systems management software.
Andrew McGrath, executive director of commercial at Virgin Media Business told Computing.co.uk that corporate server access is vital to the mobility strategies of employers.
"While it's great to see UK businesses embracing these benefits few are realising the full potential. A dongle or a smartphone may enable remote email, but without access to the company server, many workers will be held back from being truly productive on the move," he said.
According to Eric Geier at eSecurityPlanet, VPN's offer the best protection to access company servers as "all your Internet traffic travels through an encrypted tunnel, guarding it from local eavesdroppers. It protects your traffic and passwords not already encrypted and also gives encrypted traffic double encryption."
