Mobile Workforce Needs ,The Challenges with VPNs,directaccess

Mobile Workforce Needs

More users have become mobile to stay productive while they are away from the office. According to IDC, the third quarter of 2008 marked the point at which computer manufacturers began shipping more mobile computers than desktop computers worldwide (IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, December 2008).
The number of mobile users is expected to grow; in 2008, mobile workers worldwide will be 26.8% of the total workforce, and that number will increase to 30.4% by 2011 (IDC, "Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2007–2011 Forecast," Doc #209813, Dec 2007).
However, the way users access network resources hasn’t changed. Although home broadband, wireless broadband, and Wi-Fi allow users to connect to the Internet while they are away from the office, corporate firewalls prevent them from connecting to resources on the intranet. Only users physically connected to the intranet can access intranet resources. This becomes a management problem because IT administrators can update computers only when they connect to the intranet. To overcome this limitation, many organizations provide VPNs. 

The Challenges with VPNs

Traditionally, users connect to intranet resources with a VPN. However, using a VPN can be cumbersome because:

• Connecting to a VPN takes several steps, and the user needs to wait for authentication. For organizations that check the health of a computer before allowing the connection, establishing a VPN connection can take several minutes.
  
• Any time users lose their Internet connection, they need to re-establish the VPN connection.
  
• VPN connections can be problematic in some environments that filter out VPN traffic.
  
• Internet performance is slowed if both intranet and Internet traffic goes through the VPN connection.
  

Because of these inconveniences, many users avoid connecting to a VPN. Instead, they use application gateways, such as Microsoft Outlook® Web Access (OWA), to connect to intranet resources. With OWA, users can retrieve internal e-mail without establishing a VPN connection. However, users still need to connect to a VPN to open documents that are located on intranet file shares, such as those that are linked within an e-mail message.