Regardless of the remote connection technology used to connect effectively to an organization's networks, teleworkers require both home office components and corporate components:
- Home office components - The required home office components are a laptop or desktop computer, broadband access (cable, DSL, or wireless), and a VPN router or VPN client software installed on the computer. Additional components might include a wireless access point. When traveling, teleworkers need an Internet connection and a VPN client to connect to the corporate network over any available dialup, network, or broadband connection.
- Corporate components - Corporate components are VPN-capable routers, VPN concentrators, multifunction security appliances, authentication, and central management devices for resilient aggregation and termination of the VPN connections.
Quality of service (QoS)-supported VoIP and videoconferencing components is becoming an integral component of the teleworkers toolkit. QoS refers to the capability of a network to provide better service to selected network traffic, as required by voice and video applications. Providing support for VoIP and videoconferencing requires upgrades routers and devices that support QoS functionality.
The figure shows an encrypted VPN tunnel connecting the teleworker to the corporate network. This is the primary basis of secure and reliable teleworker connections. A VPN is a private data network that uses the public telecommunication infrastructure. VPN security maintains privacy using a tunneling protocol and security procedures. This course presents the IP Security (IPsec) protocol as the favored approach to building secure VPN tunnels. Unlike earlier security approaches that apply security at the application layer of the OSI model, IPsec works at the network layer where packet processing occurs.
As stated, a secure VPN tunnel is used over a public telecommunication infrastructure. This means that prior to initiating a VPN, home users must first be able to connect to Internet services using some form of high-speed, broadband access. The three most common forms of broadband access include:
- Cable
- DSL
- Broadband wireless