UUNET SA gives employees worldwide access to your LAN

Through its new Virtual Private Dial-up Network (VPDN) service, UUNET SA, corporate Internet provider, will enable organisations to give remote workers access to their corporate network.

"Usually employees can only access their LAN if they are sitting in their office and using a workstation that is already linked to the LAN," says James Power, UUNET SA`s systems development manager. "With our VPDN service, an authorised employee sitting anywhere in the world can dial up and connect to the company`s LAN - a considerable boost to their productivity."

In a mixture of dial-up and dedicated access technologies - utilising the Layer 2 Tunelling Protocol (L2TP) - UUNET SA`s VPDN service makes available to a customer organisation dedicated ports on a UUNET access server. The access server creates a secure tunnel into the corporate network via a dedicated router situated at the customer`s premises.

A remote user, using any telecommunications technology, can dial in to the nearest UUNET point of presence and establish a tunnel into the customer`s LAN. The remote user may use any LAN protocol, such as IPX, TCP/IP, Netbios or Appletalk.

The data packets can be encrypted. The encryption is end-to-end, initiating at the remote user`s machine and terminating inside the corporate network on the router. This enables the data packets to be carried securely over any medium, including a UUNET public network or the Internet.

"Because of the total cost of ownership advantage, we can provide customers with the service at a lower cost than if the customer were to build and manage his own infrastructure," says Power. "Our service includes the management and maintenance of the infrastructure end-to-end - that is, from our own equipment and the public telecommunications lines and links all the way through to the router that sits at the customer`s premises.

"In addition, we provide the customer`s IT administrator with all the tools to fully manage, in-house, user authorisation for and access to the VPDN - as he would for the LAN. The tools also generate reports on the VPDN, so that usage of the facility can be monitored and refined by the customer as necessary."