Disaster Recovery – Overloaded VPN

 In Technology

In today’s world, companies are constantly in touch with their employees irrespective of their location. To keep their top performers and provide seamless solutions to clients, companies provide work from home facility to a few employees. To provide this option to around 10-15 percent of their employees on a temporary basis, companies configure their wide area networks to provide required bandwidth to remote employees.

How companies prepare to handle disaster

When there was a swine flu outbreak in 2009 network managers of large companies found themselves facing the likelihood of large number of employees requesting work from home option. As most companies had limited facilities in their remote network infrastructure it was impossible for them to allow all their employees to work remotely simultaneously. So they resorted to a rotational system wherein groups of people worked remotely while others worked at office and vice versa.

When Cisco conducted a survey the same year to study use of remote working facilities it found out that only three out of four could provide remote access to all their employees and could not handle expansion beyond a certain point of time. Though technology is available to allow employees to work from home through virtual private networks or (VPN) several factors must be taken into consideration before using the facilities.

Supporting remote workers through VPN during disaster

When you face a surge in demand for remote work, first check with your service provider for options they can offer to handle large requests for network access. The next step is to check with your equipment suppliers about the ability to provide network licenses and other equipment within a short period of time. This will prepare you to handle responses from employees with the right kind of bandwidth and equipment. In order to have a situation wherein your employees are never short of connectivity with the company then keep a backup that can take care of VPN issues in case your regular service provider or equipment provider is not able to cope.

Maintaining communication with managed network

To manage a surge in demand for remote , companies can also employ services of network service firms which offer remote access on demand. Then can help firms deal with an emergency surge in demand by connecting their employees to the corporate network through secure VPN which are managed by third parties. Advance planning is necessary to evaluate available sources that can help you manage the surge in demand for remote connectivity. This way you can either use managed networks or get a hybrid arrangement wherein existing infrastructure can be clubbed with cloud-based network providers.

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