• It allows companies to increase the number and variety of virtual teams on projects. In doing so, you promote collaboration among staff anywhere in the country or the world.

• It enables companies to extend their hours of service to customers, or work with customers in different time zones.

• It can improve employee productivity and retention. In a survey by Kensington Group, 75% of the teleworkers polled felt they accomplished 30% more, in the same amount of time, working from home.

• It can improve employee productivity by reducing the disruption associated with commute traffic, bad weather, sick children and so on.

• It can help companies deal with tight labor markets by allowing them to use staff based in different parts of the country or even the world.

• It can help companies comply with government regulations, such as reducing commuter traffic and pollution or addressing workplace requirements for employees with disabilities.

• It allows companies greater flexibility in relocating their operations without necessarily having to lose or relocate valued employees.

Despite the fact that teleworking offers enormous benefits, many companies have been reluctant to implement it. Managers worry about supervising employees they can't see every day, while employees worry about being productive without the same resources as on-campus staff.

Companies also are concerned about the investments they may have to make in remote access equipment, as well as the security and manageability of remote-access solutions.

To enable teleworking at small and medium-sized businesses, programs have been developed by Internetworking companies to provide a complete networking solution for connecting remote workers to headquarters. Key components in these solutions should be:

• Security
• Connectivity options
• Ease of use
• Manageability
• Quality of service
• Advanced services

Perhaps the greatest concern that companies have about remote access is security. Somehow companies must provide teleworkers with access to all of the corporate resources they need to do their jobs, without making those same resources vulnerable to security breaches. These are the security solutions that should be considered:

Only a few years ago, the primary connection option for remote users was a dial-up line. While a dial-up connection is adequate for checking e-mail, it lacks the capacity, "always on" connectivity, and reliability that are required for more data-intensive and collaborative business applications.

Broadband-access technologies such as DSL, cable and wireless are not only widely available, but are sometimes less expensive than dial-up. Service providers actively market a variety of broadband service packages to residential customers that promote home-office operations, such as the ability to run an additional telephone line over a broadband connection.

Technology has made it possible for companies to connect teleworkers with speed, security and reliability. But unless the technology is easy to use, teleworkers won't be happy or productive.

Providing a Web-based graphical user interface that enables a teleworker to configure the router in just a few simple steps is a must. This means companies don't have to hire outside contractors or add help-desk personnel to support remote installations.

Small and medium-sized organizations don't have the time or money to dispatch technicians to teleworkers' homes to fix network problems. That is why centralized manageability is a key requirement for any teleworking solution. It should provide the headquarters staff the ability to implement virtual private networks (VPNs).

VPNs offer a flexible and inexpensive alternative to traditional private wide-area network connections, but they can be difficult to set up, especially at the remote site. Software tools and solutions should be created to allow technicians at a central location to "push" security policies — including encryption and authentication algorithms — to the home-office router, so there is no need for technical intervention at the remote end.

Quality of service is an increasingly important consideration as companies mix low-level traffic (such as e-mail), with mission-critical business (such as supply chain management) or time-sensitive applications (such as voice-over IP). (For details on Cisco Systems' quality-of-service congestion controlling technology, see this page.)

Without quality of service, these applications compete with each other for bandwidth. Too often the lowest priority traffic crowds out the higher priority applications, causing them to time out or decline in performance.

Quality of service is a particularly critical requirement for a teleworking program because remote locations are generally served by residential wide-area network (WAN) connections that typically offer lower speeds than the local-area network (LAN) connections. This means that applications will be contending for even less available bandwidth.

Built-in quality of service in the teleworker's home router ensures that higher priority traffic is allocated the bandwidth it requires for optimum performance.

Teleworking offers perhaps the most compelling environment for using advanced services, such as voice-over IP and videoconferencing. With IP telephony, companies can save on long-distance telephone charges by "packet-izing" voice and sending it over the same transmission line with data.

Videoconferencing is an enormously powerful tool for making virtual teams more productive and giving teleworkers and their colleagues and supervisors the "face-to-face" time that can help overcome the isolation of teleworking.

Technology has made the benefits of teleworking readily available to any company that wants to take advantage of it. Tech solutions available today are making it easier than ever for small to medium-sized companies to implement robust, secure and productive teleworking systems.