How To Beat Network Congestion For Remote Workers

The ongoing COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak has caused many enterprises to rapidly enable, or prioritise a plan for the majority of employees to work from home. This switch to a very decentralised model for connectivity to enterprise apps has a significant impact on the corporate network infrastructure, especially in cases where the network was built before public cloud services were widely adopted.

For many enterprises, remote access to the corporate WAN was not expected to be required simultaneously by all users, putting incredible strain on network elements such as VPN endpoints, backhaul MPLS circuits, and NAT assets among others. Network performance issues often result in reduced productivity and an unsatisfactory user experience.

This is a great opportunity however to demonstrate the flexibility of Software Defined Networks like Console Connect that can deliver network on demand to increase the breadth of an organisation’s VPN gateways.

Take the strain off the VPN with on-demand connectivity

The organisation could create a new VPN endpoint in a public cloud such as Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure and then connect to it instantly using Console Connect, reducing the latency on a circuit. So when providing services to an increasingly distributed workforce, network engineers are able to use Console Connect and its cloud Integrations to bring services to that congested edge and reduce the latency of an end-user not having to go to an endpoint further away to access the VPN.

An example was given by Paul Gampe, CTO of PCCW Global, who confirmed that the carrier has seen a significant increase in remote traffic during the pandemic.

“Imagine you’re an international company, and you’ve got VPN gateways traditionally hosted on-premise in London and Hong Kong. For many businesses, the workforce consuming the VPN are now far more geographically distributed than they were previously and are facing issues using the public internet to get from Sydney to Hong Kong, because this is now a very congested route.

“So instead of asking my Australian workforce to just deal with the reduced service, I can start up a VM (Virtual Machine) in Google Cloud in Sydney and deploy a VPN endpoint, bringing the distance of that last mile to near zero for the Australian users. Using Console Connect, I connect that Virtual Machine over uncongested guaranteed bandwidth connectivity back to my office environment. So instead of the last mile being Sydney to Hong Kong, the last mile is now Sydney to Sydney and your users have a great experience.”