Mobile and Remote Working

With the increasing move towards mobile and remote working, there are many benefits to both employer and employee. With increased productivity and greater job satisfaction, mobile and remote working allows employees to work around family commitments and by facilitating work schedules that better suit their needs, consequently boosts worker productivity.

Better management

Mobile and remote working reduces travel time for employees leading to lower stress levels and better time management.

The benefits of mobile and remote working are vast and include:

• Contacting a person through the most appropriate means depending on the circumstances of where they are or what they are doing, whether phone, emails or instant messaging guaranteeing they all come into force at the right time. This improves staff productivity by enabling them to react quickly.
• Interact with the office by connecting to any broadband connection in the world and receive all voicemails, emails, calls and faxes equivalent to an in-house workstation.
• By mobile, interact with office applications by voice commands.
• Using a mobile to work fluidly inside and outside the office, switching between WiFI and wireless connections.
• Linking between office systems and public network from any location, even abroad and thereby cutting the cost to local call rate.
• Talk to friends and family using Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and eliminating huge hotel bills.
• With flexible working staff can be integrated easily to the office telephony environment using the IP telephony.

Organisations who consider mobile working want equivalent security for their mobile and remote users on a par with their corporate gateway, not only for security reasons but also to comply with legal requirements. There is also the question of protecting data leakage and data loss due to stolen or mislaid laptops which is a liability issue as has happened even with Government officials leaving laptops on trains.

IT freedom

Mobile working is attractive to companies and a way that businesses can bring freedom and reduced costs with only one main caveat of security. Organisations are concerned that mobile working will become uncontrollable both inside and outside the gateway which could result in data loss and the introduction of viruses into the network and make their systems vulnerable.

With the increase in mobile and remote working there is the need for increased security and there are a wide range of products available such as certain firewalls and specific end-point solutions which can be administered centrally. Such mobile and remote working security solutions can extend network protection to mobile and remote users and thus provide the added security your organization requires for peace of mind.

How we can help

A good mobile and remote working product provider will ensure 'End Security' which combines a firewall, network access control, anti-virus, program control, anti spyware, data security and remote access. This combined package of security measures will ensure security policies can be viewed and modified from a single management console. Control offices can also install remote threat management systems incorporating virtual private networks, which provide the same level of gateway protection as there is at the Centre thus ensuring a robust system.

These systems can provide security for data in transit for mobile users when connecting into the head office or between branches. Encryption can protect remote laptop users which will safeguard against data loss or data breach. With more cost effective encryption software there is now no reason for not encrypting laptops. With wireless being a higher risk, all mobile wireless traffic should be encrypted and over VPNs to ensure data is secure.

Managing your mobile and remote working via a management provider, you will be sure of a secure, well managed system which will enable total flexibility and increase productivity and staff morale.

These guys really understand what a business needs from its IT partner, a high level of quality customer care coupled with an in depth knowledge of current technology and how to relate it to our business. They give good honest and independent advice, and you cant ask for more than that.

Pete Grayer, IT Director, Rabjohns.