The current outbreak of Swine Flu has caused many network administrators to dust off their business continuity and disaster recovery plans in preparedness for any incident which would result in staff not being able to come to the office. Providing remote access to applications and services in such a scenario is easily solved by using a VPN. The big question is whether the VPN is capable of accommodating this sudden peak in demand. The ability of a VPN to scale to meet demand is limited by a number of factors including bandwidth, the load capacity of the VPN and the availability of user licences. Often, existing VPNs are simply unable to cope with sudden and potentially short-lived demand spikes.
This is where a hosted VPN solution such as AccessMyLan shines in comparison to an appliance based VPN. As a hosted VPN service, it is designed to scale on-demand in terms of traffic volumes and active users giving a VPN administrator as much remote access capacity as they need, when they need it.
The subscription model provides the flexibility to enable VPN access for users as and when needed removing the requirement to purchase expensive VPN capacity that remains unused and idle. With the AccessMyLan licensing model, a user may be added for a little as a day and only incur a charge for one day.
The AccessMyLan service does all the ‘heavy lifting’ associated with encrypting connections so that there is minimal load on the system in the office hosting the AccessMyLan VPN Agent. We have customers with thousands of active users served from a single VPN Agent on a basic server. Using this approach means that the VPN Administrator avoids all the capacity planning headaches and the cost of buying a bigger box than is needed.
Bandwidth can be a severely limiting factor in a business continuity scenario as more and more users attempt to connect. Again, AccessMyLan has a number of tricks up it’s sleeve to allow the use of multiple Internet connections and to split traffic across multiple internet feeds. For example, if the primary Internet circuit is overloaded, you could connect a broadband modem to a PC or server in the office and install an additional AccessMyLan VPN Agent on it. You simply configure what type of traffic goes through this additional VPN Agent route to split traffic across links. This is seamless to the remote user who does not know (or need to know) that their shared folder access is through the main Internet link while their email is accessed via a temporary mobile broadband link. The neat part of this is that there is no requirement for a static IP address and that VPN Agents can be deployed on-demand without any reconfiguration of remote clients.
Even if you already have a VPN, having a hosted VPN in place alongside your existing solution gives the flexibility and capacity needed to accommodate occasional spikes in demand. Access is quickly provided to the displaced worker with either the AccessMyLan VPN Client (self-installed by the user from an AccessMyLan generated email) or on-demand via a web browser.
While we all hope disaster doesn’t strike, it’s imperative that network administrators are prepared for the unexpected - like a swine flu outbreak forcing everyone to stay at home. AccessMyLan provides a simple and cost-effective disaster recovery solution for just such an event.
P.s. Our Disaster Recovery White Paper (PDF) explains how AccessMyLan can be a part of your business continuity plans.
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