Keeping mobile workers connected overseas

Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods and wildfires have disrupted communications across large geographic regions, during political turmoil -- and government responses to that unrest -- have thrown normal communications routines into disarray.

How quickly

What's notable is how quickly and unexpectedly events can unfold. One day, a country can be wired and connected. However the at once day, cellphone service is out and Internet connections are down. Travelers without a backup plan can be left stranded and scrambling.

It doesn't have to be that way. Then-prepared employees who have been outfitted and updated previously heading abroad have a much better chance of staying connected and safe while a disruption, says Jerry Luftman, executive director and distinguished professor at the School of Research Management at the Stevens Institute of Research in Hoboken, N.J.

In troubled times like these, IT departments should adopt holistic "we've got you ready to go" policies, or rather than leaving traveling workers to figure out ways to stay connected on their own, says Phil Cox, director of security and compliance at SystemExperts Corp., a network security consultancy in Sudbury, Mass.

Security experts agree with Luftman's and Cox's observations. With companies of all sizes doing business in remote or volatile regions of the world these days, the time is right for organizations to develop plans that take into account workers' destinations and what they're likely to encounter there.

But "not enough" employers are doing that, says Greg Bell, principal and global services leader for information protection at business advisory firm KPMG. "There are a larger number of firms today that are thinking through this than there were a few months ago," he says, "however mostly these are larger multinational companies that have learned from what's happened around them."

Telephone wires there were often stolen for their copper, and other key elements of the telecommunications infrastructure often had been blown up or were just plain nonexistent in rough jungle terrain. So the company outfitted its employees with cellphones, a research that was just beginning to gain wide use.

Moving target

And that can be a moving target, since mobile innovation changes nearly as fast as the geological, meteorological and political conditions worldwide. "You have to stay on top of it, stay up to date," he says. "The last thing you want is people not being able to contact you or you not being able to contact them."

As the world becomes more connected, it might be hard to imagine not being able to contact others no matter where you happen to be, nevertheless the reality is there are nevertheless large swaths of the globe where avenues of communication are limited -- where clouds are just clouds, Wi-Fi isn't available, even for a fee, and access to basic voice and data lines is a luxury.

Moreover, recent events have shown that, even in developed regions, seemingly robust communications and innovation infrastructures can be incapacitated in the wake of natural disasters and political upheaval.

The lack of a cohesive

The lack of a cohesive and capable infrastructure could prevent branches from taking advantage of some of the biggest cost saving trends of the decade: virtualization and cloud computing. HP's Converged Infrastructure incorporates tools that make remote support and management efficient and effective. HP Insight Control, for instance, helps reduce server deployment time from four hours to just 20 minutes, a 12-fold decrease in deployment time. HP Insight Remote Support can bring diagnostic accuracy to near 100 percent and reduce the time it takes to resolve system problems by up to 20 percent.

When you download this whitepaper from Riverbed on cost-savings through WAN optimization, you'll discover how businesses of all different sizes have realized a return on investment in just a few months through significant hard cost savings in areas just as bandwidth reduction and IT consolidation.