Common Issues System and Network Engineers Encounter When The Workforce Goes Remote

As people are rapidly moving to working from home, we thought it would be useful to share some common issues that system and network engineers might bump into.

Bandwidth Contention on VPN

Problem:

With the majority of people connecting over VPN, bandwidth can become constrained by internal application traffic combined with the double hit of Internet traffic being downloaded and then sent back out the same circuit to the client.

Possible Mitigations:

Split-tunneling: Since the protection and monitoring of firewalls could be lost by sending some client Internet traffic out directly, we recommend only doing so for known “good” routes. For instance, the IP address ranges for windows update, Office 365, etc.
QoS policies: Use QoS “Quality of Service” to both protect traffic (like voice over IP) and limit known bandwidth offenders like Microsoft updates and YouTube. It’s also helpful to limit all users to a max per-user policy. Per-user limiting ensures one person cannot impact the entire organization.

More Resources:

Application Slowness - Not Bandwidth Related

Problem:

Applications with a high number of transactions (usually client/server) could become quite slow when you add the latency of VPN and longer distances. For instance, applications within a LAN might see 1-2 ms of latency for every transaction. Over a VPN, the latency will vary based on many factors but even if the increase was a modest 15 ms, that means that each transaction will become 15 times slower. This can cause application slowness, hangs or crashes (due to timeouts).

Possible Mitigations:

Virtual Desktops: Creating the desktop environment for remote workers on a server in the same datacenter as the server-side of your client/server applications will yield the lowest latency possible. The key difference between the technology options here is the remote worker latency. For people under 150 ms, the Microsoft RDP protocol can work quite well. For clients over 150 ms, you will want to take a look at the ICA, Blast Extreme or PCoIP protocols within Citrix or VMWare’s offerings.
Virtual Applications: Same thing as virtual desktops in regards to latency but sequencing applications and then presenting them seamless windows uses less system resources and can also create better flexibility of applications.

More Resources:

User Data Not Available

Problem:

Documents stored locally on computers or servers in the office are not accessible remotely.

Possible Mitigations:

File Servers: Moving the data to file servers can make that data more accessible and also ensure it is backed-up. However, it can aggravate the bandwidth contention problem when accessed over VPN.
Cloud Services: Cloud services like Microsoft’s OneDrive and DropBox can be used to sync the localized files to their services and from the cloud to multiple devices like laptops, tablets and phones. Be watchful for large (> 15 GB not supported), or in-use, files that might not sync or hold-up the sync service. Outlook PSTs and OneNote files are usually the worst offenders.