Remote access to work: best choice or only choice.

The January '94 earthquake disaster in Los Angeles highlighted the benefits of remote access or telecommuting for many businesses. The recent earthquakes and resulting destruction of local highways forced business to look for new and innovative ways to conduct business. In order to restart their businesses, companies must connect two key resources, their employees and their corporate information data bases. It is possible, using personal computers, modems, and remote access equipment at company offices, to give employees at home access to information in the same way they would access it from their desks. They can look up reference data, prepare reports, send and receive electronic mail, and access their local office equipment and corporate mainframes without having to learn anything new.

Recovery from the earthquake has made people more aware of the benefits of remote access computing. Remote access computing is not limited to disaster victims, however. Environmental mandates and the need to reduce pollutants, along with the desire to accommodate employees with more flexible working conditions, and to give travelers access to their office systems from hotel rooms has already caused many businesses to look more closely at remote access. The Clean Air Act of 1990 requires that all companies with more than 100 employees reduce solo driving among their employees. They must show that they have increased the number of riders to 1.5 per car. According to the EPA, telecommuting allows your employer to count you as a rider with no car. If you telecommute, and two colleagues commute alone, your company has met the target: three riders, two cars.

Employers in 13 cities with severe air pollution must meet the target by November, 1994. In New York, to attract or keep workers with critical skills, companies are allowing their workers to work at home several days a week. The employees simply find it less stressful to work from home, and give their companies high marks for allowing them to do so. The companies report higher morale and increased productivity.

The proliferation of portable computers has also fueled the need to access office information from outside the office. This article was written from my hotel in San Francisco, with frequent access to our office system in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina to check facts. For all the reasons above, Forrester Research has estimated that the market for remote access computing will grow from $400 million to more than $2.5 billion over the next five years. What is remote access computing? Remote access computing allows you to get to office information: reports, letters, spec sheets, rate tables, shipping schedules, price lists, and electronic mail from your home, hotel room, or customer office. Remote access computing combines a personal computer, modems to access telephone lines, and an office network to extend the capabilities of the office network to the remotely located personal computer.

There are three common ways to access information remotely. First, you can make your personal computer emulate or look like a data terminal. People have been doing this for years. However, it is hard to take full advantage of modern graphical applications like word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation packages with most emulation programs.

Second, you can remotely operate a computer in your office. Your computer keyboard and screen mimic the keyboard and screen of your office computer; all the computations are done on your office computer. This mode also breaks down when you use highly graphical applications, because the amount of information that has to be exchanged to keep your remote screen up to date strains the capacity of the telephone lines connecting you to your office computer.

The third method addresses many of these limitations and is becoming increasingly popular. This method keeps the computing and graphics on your local computer, and only accesses your office computer or server when you need data that's not located at home. This method is called Remote Node access, because it effectively makes your home computer an extension, or node, of your office network. The personal computer connects to a remote node server, which lets the remote personal computer act as if it were directly attached to the office network. The objective is to make the remote personal computer act the same way that an office computer does.

Remote node servers are available today for the most common types of office local area networks, or LANs. Until recently, however, remote node servers were limited to only a few applications. If you wanted to get to your electronic mail, you accessed the electronic mail server. If you wanted to access corporate data bases, you accessed the corporate data base server. Access is now available for most applications with a single telephone link. This allows a user to access electronic mail and a database located on a mainframe at the same time, just they way they would do so if they were at the office. Advances in analog modem signaling techniques continue to make personal computer communications faster. Where 2400 bits per second (about 15 seconds per page of text), was common in 1990, now 14,400 bits per second (about 2-3 seconds per page) is common now. Even higher speeds are possible with special digital techniques. A technique called ISDN can operate at 64,000 or even 128,000 bits per second. Telephone links are still far slower than standard office LANs, making ways to improve responsiveness for remote access very important. Even ISDN speeds pale against normal LAN speeds of 10 million or 16 million bits per second. The better remote access packages include both data compression, to reduce the number of bits that must be sent for a given amount of data, and filtering, to eliminate unnecessary messages.

In addition to multiple application access, and efficient communications, there is a real need for security and protection of corporate assets for all businesses contemplating remote access implementations. The better remote access products offer multiple levels of security, from encrypted password access to callback options to third party authentication, to support of external credit card solutions. Some products also provide user monitoring to disconnect inactive users or to limit user access by time of day or day of the week. The obstacles to effective remote access computing are surprisingly few. Companies, or their employees already have many of the personal computers needed. Some estimate that as many as half of the personal computers and accompanying modems required are already available.

Remote access servers and the required software typically cost no more than $750-1000 per user, a figure easily offset by reduced commuting or higher productivity. Administration and training can be inexpensive, especially if your remote access server makes applications look the same way from home as they do in the office. Experts suggest that you set objectives and get started with a prototype program with 10-50 employees.

Start thoughtfully, but start soon, they advise. Experience so far has shown 10-20% productivity improvements on the average, with few cases showing productivity decreases. The Telecommuting Advisory Council [phone] can help you with information and case histories.

There are several suppliers of remote access computing equipment including the IBM 8235 DIAL In Access to LANs Server, which provides all the functions and features discussed above, in a highly reliable, flexible, inexpensive package with international IBM service and support.

Bob Roth is manager of Campus Networking Systems at IBM. He is an expert in network computing and speaks frequently to user groups and trade shows.