 Best practice in remote access services
| Do you have to support people working away from the office such as home workers, sales staff on the road and senior managers? Do you ask yourself: should we be encouraging home-working? Can you significantly reduce office costs? Are you using the best technologies? Can you outsource it?
A global financial services company asked h2index to find out the best practice in Remote Access Services (RAS). We spoke to senior IT technical managers from 16 large financial, consumer, pharmaceutical, energy, and professional services companies. All participants have well established RAS with substantial numbers of knowledge workers.
Several common themes emerged from the study.
- A robust and flexible RAS is now an employment pre-requisite for knowledge workers. All companies interviewed provide RAS to a high proportion of eligible users and it is definitely seen as a way of improving employee satisfaction.
- Almost all have a RAS with two modes: full access (all corporate IT) and limited access (personal productivity applications).
- Half the companies interviewed are actively encouraging home-working to reduce facility costs, especially if they have office space in costly locations. Part-time and ad hoc home working is common, but full-time home working is still unusual: only one company has a measurable proportion of home-workers.
- All new RAS solutions are deploying an SSL VPN technology, although companies are not rushing to decommission older IPsec systems.
- RAS is seen as an essential component of business continuity planning (BCP) and systems are sized accordingly.
Two further interesting points came to light. Firstly most participants report that hardware, and not software, is the bottleneck at times of high demand.
Secondly we asked participants which solutions would be around in three years' time. Many indicated that cloud solutions would become all pervasive, but that there will always be some company-specific applications that are not suitable for the cloud. Some companies are already using direct SSL access from browser to corporate productivity applications such as Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) and SalesForce.com. Several companies referred to "putting Apps on the Internet": the Jericho Forum approach, but real progress is slow.
As a result of the study, h2index has strongly recommended the client move to a SSL VPN system sized according to their BCP plan requirements, and consider using a third party to manage and run their RAS, possibly their current network services provider.
Phil Hopley, director, h2index: "After this study and a similar study about end user services (EUS), which we described in our last newsletter, h2index has been asked by several participants if we will repeat the study each year. Every study has been done for a specific client, but if there is sufficient interest, we would be delighted to continue the studies on shared cost basis." |
Forums: unified communications
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h2index runs several forums where representatives from large multinationals get together periodically. - Small informal groups
- Selected and qualified IT managers
- Organizations of similar scale
- Discussing IT issues that really bother them
- Organised and facilitated by h2index
Unified Communications
The unified communications (UC) forum met for the second time in September 2010. The group discussed several areas where the practice and emphasis of UC has changed considerably since the previous meeting in late 2009.
Microsoft Office Communications Services (OCS) is now central to most companies UC initiative and strongly preferred to solutions based on internet protocol telephony (IPT). Uncertainties about OCS that were previously expressed have largely disappeared. Some companies have OCS fully deployed providing instant messaging (IM), presence, telephony and video.
Video is gaining in importance and considerable growth is anticipated. The biggest constraint is not bandwidth as most people expect, but the processing power required for high definition (HD). Members report less use of high-end video conferencing facilities and much more use of personal, desk based or meeting room based video services.
Device freedom is increasingly significant as employees demand their choice in devices. There was a marked change in the tone of discussions from "avoiding iPhones" to "embracing senior executive choice".
All members reported that UC is changing IT managers' working practices profoundly. They increasingly need to coordinate the roll-out of UC with other internal functions such as HR, health & safety, security, facilities and tax.
This series of meetings is designed for large scale enterprises (tens of thousands of employees), operating in multiple countries, and participants include major international companies in pharmaceuticals, financial services, energy, consumer goods and technology.
We also run regular meetings on other topics, such as End User Services and Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). If you would like to join any of our forums, please reply to this email. We work hard to ensure that the organizations in any one forum are of similar scale, face similar issues, and involve senior representatives directly responsible for the specific topic. |
Participants wanted for upcoming studies
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h2index is continually undertaking research for its clients and each project requires a panel of representative organisations. In return each participating company receives a copy of the research. We are currently in discussion with clients in relation to three potential studies: - Consumerisation of IT - also known as "bring your own computer"
- IT security
- "White glove" services - IT support for senior executives
All participants in h2index studies are senior IT managers from large organizations. If you are interested in being a participant in any of these studies, please reply to this email.
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If you found
our newsletter useful, please forward it to colleagues who may also be
interested. We are always delighted to receive feedback. Kind regards Phil Hopley and Simon Bennett www.h2index.com+44 (0) 1737 830993 |
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