To connect many distant employees at once, all office locations must be able to access the same network resources. Most times, a centralized location—a "mother ship," if you will—would house the core infrastructure needed to establish the network, such as the servers and databases. Branch offices, on the other hand, require no such infrastructure; the remote offices link to the mother ship via a specific type of connection.
Traditionally, companies used to install Wide Area Networks (WANs) to connect remote offices. WANs are used to connect LANs—Local Area Networks from disparate offices—together. However, installation and overhead of LANs and WANs is expensive.
"Prior to now, and in years gone by, implementing WANs required a lot of resources, but in the last several years with the advent of the cloud, it's gotten very cheap and very simple to implement," says David Eisner, President and CEO of Dataprise, an IT service provider based in Rockville, Maryland. "These days, what most offices are doing, as opposed to implementing dedicated WAN connectivity, businesses can rely and depend on Virtual Private Networks—VPNs—that run over the Internet."
VPNs, which provide secure connections between individual users and their organization's network over the Internet, have several upsides. They provide more secure site-to-site connections, they transfer information much faster than WANs, and most importantly to small and medium-sized businesses, VPNs are much less expensive, since you can use a single leased line to the Internet for each office, cutting down on broadband costs.
While VPNs are highly recommended and trusted, a new technology gaining traction with companies is the remote desktop. Remote desktops requires software or an operating system that allows applications to run remotely on a server, but to be displayed locally simultaneously. This network server hosts remote files and applications in a secure location, ensuring your data is never lost, even when something happens to the device you're working on.
"Remote desktops help you control where the data is located," says Tim Crawford, CIO and vice president of IT at All Covered, a national IT service provider based in Redwood City, California. "So now, you don't have data roaming out there in the world; we hear all the time where a laptop gets stolen, or someone's house gets broken into and a computer gets stolen. You want to control that data."
Companies need to set up a reliable and secure system for exchanging and saving data. After all, if can't protect your own data, why should your clients trust their data is safe with you?
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