Remote Worker Introduction
As companies increase the number of remote workers or employees working for home, the ability to quickly, reliably and securely access company servers and files becomes crucial for business continuity. Increasingly, these solutions need to operate on a “company-wide” scale as businesses prepare for significant disruptions in response to the threat of COVID-19. When considering solutions, it’s important to note what works for a handful of remote workers may not scale to every worker.
We will cover several scenarios, so you can identify the best way for your employees to remotely access data when they are telecommuting. Based on your needs, some solutions might make more sense than others.
Remote Access Options for Remote Workers
1) Small Files
If you have a small amount of data, such as doc, pdf or xls files, you can store them in the cloud using various solutions. For example, you could use EFSS (Enterprise File Sync and Share) or CCP (Content Collaboration Platform) solutions, like Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Egnyte or Microsoft OneDrive. These solutions are developed to provide the team with collaborative remote access to files.
2) Large Files
If your files are too big for the EFSS or CCP solutions, then you will need an alternative. The problem with these solutions is that it is built on top of the TCP/IP protocol, which has issues when it works over unreliable networks such as WiFi or when the cloud is geographically far away from a user. In such a case, you would need a solution that would use a custom UDP based protocol to overcome connectivity issues. Resilio Connect is a good example of a product that could provide your employees with the fastest access to your company’s data.
3) On-Premise Only (VPN alternative)
If your files are not big, but you prefer not to move data to the cloud for security or compliance reasons, you could use a Server Message Block (SMB) over a virtual private network (VPN) connection. This would work if you have a fast and reliable connection between offices, but reliability would degrade significantly in the case of consumer-grade networks, which would require a VPN alternative solution. Resilio Connect uses a custom UDP protocol that could effectively share files over such networks, without the need to move your data to the cloud. Users would simply need to install an agent to get fast and reliable access to your local filer or SMB drive. This approach would overcome unreliability and slow performance of SMB over a VPN service.
4) Unreliable Networks
If your employees work over unreliable consumer-grade networks such us LTE/3G or ADSL, accessing data via a VPN provider to an SMB will be slow. The TCP/IP based SMB file share becomes very slow as packet roundtrip time increases. You will need to look for a VPN alternative solution that could effectively solve two problems, slowness of TCP/IP over slow lines and unreliable lines. You’ll need a product that can handle transmission interruption and be able to continue data transfer after the interruption, rather than starting transfer from the beginning. The best solution on the market is Resilio Connect that is significantly faster than SMB over VPN and does not require data retransmission when the connection is interrupted.
| Feature | Resilio Connect | EFSS/CCP (Dropbox) | SMB/VPN |
| VPN alternative | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Fast over a long distance | ✔ | ||
| Work well with small files (<10MB) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Work well with big files (>10MB) | ✔ | ||
| Work with on-premise NAS and filers | ✔ | ✔ |
Resilio Connect provides your remote workers fast and reliable remote access to small and big files, for both your on-premise NAS and filers as well as the cloud. Resilio Connect solves the slowness of the SMB protocol over VPN, provides an easy and secure way to access data via a very intuitive end-user interface. Its enterprise-grade security will ensure that your data is safe and employees will get the data they need when telecommuting or working remotely. Resilio Connect is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, FreeBSD, and all major NAS solutions.
Learn more about Resilio Connect and how it can provide fast and secure data access for remote workers. Or, schedule a demo and start a free trial to find out.
