By Andrew R. Hickey, SearchNetworking.com

Remote access has become commonplace, and many IT managers are more comfortable with allowing staff to work remotely, but a recent survey sponsored by SonicWall found that when staff go remote, the same managers are still concerned about security, disaster recovery and productivity.

March 2008
Anton Levchuk

Fans of flexible working, of which remote working is just one element, have been trying to communicate the benefits for some time, and that message is starting to get through. More and more UK companies are putting policies in place to ensure that their employees have more flexibility over their location.

March, 2008
Securityextra.com

Remote working is not a simple issue to tackle effectively and securely in situations when it must be done right. To give us the low down we invited Anton Levchuk, Marketing Director of Famatech to provide us with some insight on the things we simply need to know in order to pull it off correctly.

For those people whose office is actually a ‘patch’, who are on the road all day, every day seeing clients or going to meetings, setting up their laptop and accessing their corporate emails from a coffee shop just off the motorway is an all too familiar occurrence. And it isn’t just these ‘road warriors’ who are transforming the face of remote working, For many large companies, employee location isn’t a consideration any more – they find the right person for the job and it doesn’t matter if that person works from home or the office. Technology enables organisations to be more flexible than ever before – making life easier for all concerned.

As well as employees who are based out of the office permanently, either through the nature of their role or their location, technology also enables traditionally office-based staff to work remotely if they need to. This can be useful when transport problems, weather or even someone’s personal circumstances make it difficult for them to get in to work – remote working isn’t always a matter of choice.

In the UK, Friday 18 May 2007 was National Work from Home Day.  Across the country companies were encouraged to allow employees to work from home in what was described as “…an opportunity to demonstrate that, without the stress induced by the workplace environment and the long commute most have to endure, people can be more productive occasionally working from home.”

Recognising the benefits that remote working offers, more and more UK companies are putting in place policies to enable it, and encouraging home-working practices.  Flexible working evangelists have often enumerated the benefits: a wider pool of potential employees from which to choose; increased productivity through reduced stress and enhanced work-life balance; maximising the time of corporate road warriors and business travellers; and, of course, the topic du jour, a smaller carbon footprint. 

April 2008
Guy Clapperton

The idea of working from home appeals to many people, to the extent that some of them say they'll take a pay cut in order to do it. This has been shown in independent research; Famatech, a company that specialises in secure connections to a corporate computing system from a remote location, found that 22 per cent of employees worldwide would accept less money to avoid the drudge of the daily commute.

A sanity check says the figure is too high; people's responses to a survey will differ from their decision when actually faced with the prospect of less money, and a remote connection specialist is almost bound to have phrased the question in such a way that people would give the answer the company wanted to hear. Even if the actual figure would be halved, though, it shows a lot of willingness to work away from the office.

January 2008
TMCnet

Moscow, Russia -- A recent survey has revealed that almost one in four employees (22 per cent) would be prepared to take a pay cut to work from home. Six per cent would be prepared to take a reduction in pay of between six and 10 per cent and two per would be prepared to take a pay cut of between 16 and 20 per cent. The global online survey was carried out by Famatech, a leading provider of fast and secure remote control software for desktop and server management.