Has this ever happened to you?
As an employee working from home, you open your laptop, connect to your corporate VPN, frantically search for your phone to enable that VPN, only to realize you’ve left it in the other room! So, you go to the other room, grab the phone, get back to your desk and start the process all over again. And by now, you’re already 5 minutes late to your first meeting. There’s got to be a better way.
There IS!
What if I told you, that you could open your laptop, and that’s it? Just like that you’re in. Accessing your corporate emails, files, servers, what have you. Creating an office-like experience from the comfort of your home while maintaining security standards synonymous with any enterprise branch office, while all the “heavy lifting” is taken care of behind the scenes.
Cisco ISR1000 Series Routers
Now that we have the infomercial out of the way, let’s get into the details of the solution.
Simplicity
Whether you are an end user connecting to the corporate network from home, or a network administrator designing the remote worker network infrastructure for your organization, this solution is designed to make your transition to the home office, seamless. Allow me to elaborate.
The idea here is to leverage pre-existing Cisco infrastructure – Cisco ISR 1000 series routers that are not being used in the office, Cisco SD-WAN deployed in the network, Cisco Virtual Accounts registered to Plug And Play Connect – to enable zero touch provisioning of the remote worker routers. This way, an administrator responsible for deploying the solution is already familiar with SD-WAN device templates and can pre-stage the configurations while the router is being shipped to the end user.
If you are new to Cisco SD-WAN, let me put your mind at ease. The “heavy lifting” referred to earlier, is in reality simpified to 3 screens:
- Select the configuration template page from the dashboard/home screen
- Attach the Remote Worker template to all Remote Worker routers
- Confirm the configuration being pushed to each device
As for the end user, initializing the device could not be easier. Connect the power source and provide an internet connection – this is typically done by connecting the ethernet cable provided with the router to a cable modem, or in remote locations with no wired connectivity options, directly with a SIM card for LTE/5G connectivity. With that, just connect to the corporate WiFi network – it’s really that simple!
Security
The next natural question that arises is security – How do I ensure that the connection from my remote location to the office is secure? When it comes to protecting your network, Cisco provides the flexibility you need, whether on-prem, in the cloud, or both. Cisco Umbrella integrates cloud security features including DNS, secure web gateway, firewall and cloud access security (CASB) into a single platform. We continue to deeply integrate Umbrella with Cisco SD-WAN to deliver ease of use that is unmatched across the industry.
SaaS
A major portion of my day is spent online – Office 365, Google applications, SharePoint, Box, making presentations, editing documents, surfing the web for information, uploading and downloading data to online portals. It never occurred to me how much time I spent online when we were in the office. Yet working from home makes it clear how much longer it takes to use SaaS applications!
This is where Cloud OnRamp comes in. Cloud OnRamp for SaaS allows Cloud Access through Direct Internet Access Links. SD-WAN can select the best connection for each SaaS application through the DIA links or through the SD-WAN overlay links. Some remote workers that require an always-on network. One with high availability using multiple internet links (Wired + LTE). Cloud OnRamp constantly monitors the health of all links to SaaS applications. It provides real time statistics for loss, latency and jitter and registers each link’s score as a number between 1 to 10 – 10 representing the best possible connectivity. It ensures that if the performance of one link slips, it will quickly switch over to the other to maintain the SaaS session.
If the work from home era is here to stay, we want to ensure that we have you covered. It is believed that once the nightmare of COVID-19 is behind us, more and more employees will transition to a more flexible schedule where some, if not most, of their work will be done from a home office. With outdoor testing centers and more recently vaccination camps where wired connectivity is not always an option, many health care providers have turned to LTE as their primary internet connection. By providing an office-like environment that is secure and easy to manage for your entire remote network, financial brokers, high-level executives, IT administrators and government employees can spend their time and resources on more productive tasks rather than worrying about maintaining connectivity to the network.
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