The Need for Speed in Today’s Remote and Branch Work Environments

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Let’s face facts: Today’s workforce is more mobile and remote than ever! Cultivating a mobile, remote workforce is a necessity for today’s business. Remote workers significantly reduce overhead costs. They enable organizations to conduct business worldwide, around the clock. Plus, the ability to be remote and work helps businesses capture and retain top talent, wherever that talent may be.

Gartner, Inc. has estimated the number of worldwide remote workers will pass 46 million this year (2011). A recent report by non-profit WorldatWork (Telework 2011: A Special Report From WorldatWork) states that the teleworking population in 2010 was 26.2 million people, which according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics represents nearly 20% of the U.S. adult working population. Imagine, almost 1/5^th of all U.S. adult workers work remotely! And, as of June 9, 2011, the U.S. Federal government’s Telework Enhancement Act went into effect, requiring federal agencies to draw up policies to govern and promote teleworking.

However, productivity while a user is remote or traveling outside of their corporate office continues to be an issue. The number of applications today that are “heavy” and data-laden, or that are rich media based has simply exploded. Wide area network bandwidth remains limited and can be prone to significant latency issues. Plus, protocol and application chattiness are also major impediments. These limitations impact the connection experience for remote, traveling and branch users. Their productivity while remotely accessing the network and applications can be severely affected.

But, today’s on the move, remote and branch office workers demand fast LAN-like speeds from wherever they may be while accessing mission critical applications and data to perform their day to day functions.  These users could be working from home, a hotel room, an airport or a local Starbucks. Branch office workers may be in a remote branch office in the next town, or in the Antarctic. Bottom line is that no matter where they are, traveling, telecommuting and remote branch users want the same level of speed, security and quality of experience that their coworkers enjoy from their Microsoft Windows-based devices while wired or wirelessly tethered to the corporate or campus network when accessing intranet or web-based applications like Documentum or Oracle, email like Microsoft Outlook, collaboration and file sharing applications like SharePoint.

That’s where Junos^® Pulse comes in. The Junos^® Pulse Application Acceleration Service, in conjunction with the Junos^® Pulse Secure Access Service, addresses the remote, in transit and branch office users’ “need for speed” by delivering accelerated and secure network and application access with a significantly enhanced quality of experience.

Through a single client (Junos Pulse) and over a single, integrated services gateway (Juniper’s MAG Series Junos Pulse Gateways), the Junos Pulse Application Acceleration Service together with the Junos Pulse Secure Access Service optimizes secure remote access from Windows-based devices to many “heavy”, data-laden mission-critical networked and web- or cloud-based applications, including EMC Documentum, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Seibel and SAP, to name a few; Microsoft Exchange applications including SharePoint, Microsoft Outlook and others; as well as Microsoft shared drives and common applications such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. The Junos Pulse Application Acceleration Service uses proven and innovative compression and protocol acceleration techniques to optimize and accelerate application and data access for any size enterprise and their on the move, remote and branch office users, greatly increasing user productivity and saving valuable time and cost, while enabling the enterprise to maintain control of and visibility into their remote workforce.

Junos Pulse Application Acceleration Service, in concert with Junos Pulse Secure Access Service, empowers organizations to provide their remote, on the road and branch office users – employees, contractors, partners and other approved, authorized users – fast, role-based application  access to nearly any networked application and its data, with remote access protected by security that they know and trust.

Because today, in this economy, no matter where you are working from, every second lost waiting for an application to load is a second of lost productivity!