Remote access helps employees support globalization and collaboration worldwide. With Cisco's global presence, employees regularly need to collaborate across continents and time zones.
Remote home access eases the burden of attending meetings outside of regular business hours. It also provides the flexibility for employees to continue working from home in an emergency, such as severe weather, disease outbreak or a disaster that prevents them from coming into the office. This greater work flexibility provides an extra layer of resilience in keeping Cisco running under adverse conditions.
In 2001, to deliver home-based remote access to its users, Cisco IT introduced a software-based virtual private network (VPN) solution. This solution provided the necessary security and authentication features that Cisco IT demanded, but establishing a connection took time and lacked some important features - employees could not connect more than one device to the network and home-office IP phones were not supported.
To better meet the demands of a full home-office environment, Cisco IT implemented a new, hardware-based solution—the Enterprise-Class Teleworker solution. The solution’s four main constructs are end-to-end connectivity, end-to-end deployment, end-to-end management, and end-to-end security. The solution combines a router with a high-speed broadband connection at the employee’s home.
With the Enterprise-Class Teleworker solution, Cisco has created a sustainable global deployment and support model capable of meeting the needs of teleworkers around the world. It provides global management capabilities that ensure reliability, availability, and security. "The Enterprise-Class Teleworker solution combined different Cisco technologies," says Plamen Nedeltchev, ECT Architect. "Integrating those technologies and capabilities into a single device while maintaining low TCO was the biggest challenge of this project. But it was a challenge we met through zero-touch deployment."
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Cisco on Cisco
Remote Access Enterprise Class Teleworker Case Study
Enterprise Class Teleworker Solution