With the rapid switch to remote working, many IT departments are struggling to support staff that are now seeing their home networks become an extension of the corporate intranet. Home broadband and WI-FI is no longer just for Netflix, gaming, and social media but now an essential work resource that is competing for bandwidth against other activities in the locked-down home. Although SaaS and cloud-based technologies can help, each displaced user needs a uniformed and managed method that allows secure and reliable remote access – while organisations need to ensure that remote working doesn’t become a security gap for exploitation by cyber criminals.
The immediate response from IT departments to a massive surge in remote working is to deploy additional VPN capacity. Although this provides a more secure tunnel from homeworkers across the internet to corporate resources; VPN does not solve any performance issues.
However, raw bandwidth is not the only issue. Not only are devices treated equally but so is all the application traffic. This means a critical Zoom-based conference call with an important client will have the same delivery priority as another user sending data packets for an online gaming session or streaming cat videos from Facebook.
