Even before COVID-19, we were headed towards a future with more people working at home, at least part-time. I’ve seen estimates pre-COVID that as many as 10% of office workdays are done from home – that number has currently skyrocketed and it’s likely that working from home will never return to the old levels.

For working at home to be most effective, employees must have easy access to the same software and the same data as when they work in the office. Employers still have the same goals for data security and for protecting sensitive company data and customer data. Workers at home need to be protected from phishing, malware, and other attempts to gain access to customer data.

This all comes at a time when we’ve undergone a transition to security that is based upon building walls around sensitive data. Companies have made data more secure by restricting access to data from outside the company buildings. Twenty years ago it was common for companies to allow workers to dial-in to company servers, but over time those connections have proven to be the easiest path for hackers to gain access to company data. Companies have built data fortresses to protect data from external access, and suddenly, companies are being asked to poke holes in those walls to allow employees to gain access to company systems from home.

To complicate matters even further, in the last five years many mid-sized companies shed IT staff as they moved everything to the cloud. Many companies are not staffed or equipped to make the shift to allow working from home, meaning that opening up their networks to home-based employees has automatically opened new risks to hacking.

The question I ask today is if there is a broadband solution that smaller ISPs can offer to make it safer for companies to support employees working from home. The biggest carriers already have such solutions, at least for their largest corporate clients. For example, AT&T and Verizon have had products that allow for guaranteed secured data connections for corporate or government cell phones. Fortune 500 companies and the military have been able to buy similar products to provide for safe remote wireline broadband connections.

AT&T just announced a new product called AT&T Home Office Connectivity that will work on DSL, fiber, or AT&T wireless. The product essentially creates a carrier-class VPN between employees and a virtual gateway to connect to a company WAN. The AT&T solution makes the multitude of connections to employees in the AT&T cloud while only creating one path between AT&T and the company servers.

It’s still questionable if the big carriers can scale these kinds of products to meet the need of smaller corporations and local governments. The big intense security platforms are incredibly expensive and are out of price reach of the average business.

However, there is a real need for guaranteed safe connections between office and home. Companies have to find a way to trust that data exchanged with employees working outside the office is as safe as data moved around inside the business. I’m guessing the explosion of people working at home is going to result in some spectacular data breaches that will scare all of the companies that have sent employees home to work.

In addition to security, those working at home need easy solutions for all of the other routine functions performed at the office including things like spam filtering, and secure data backup and disaster recovery.

There are solutions available to solve at least some of these issues today, but again they are complicated for companies without a sizable IT staff. Some of the solutions include things like:

• Cloud-based security software is a set of software and technologies that help companies meet regulatory compliance (like with the new California privacy laws) and that are designed to protect company and customer data in a wide variety of circumstances. This differs from traditional security software in that every transaction with the cloud can be assigned different levels of privacy and access to data. For example, this is the kind of software that allows customers to review their data and nobody else’s.
• Microsegmentation is software that can create secure zones inside data centers and cloud deployments to enable companies to isolate different parts of their workload. For example, remote employees could be given access to more limited data than those working in the office, and everything they do remotely can be blocked from having any access to core servers.
• Cloud SD-WAN is a technology that has been used for companies that operate multiple branches. Each remote employee can be treated as a separate branch of the business and be provided with an individual firewall and other standard security protocols.

Smaller ISPs ought to find some way to explore these kinds of products to offer to customers with remote workers. This is likely to be beyond the capability of most ISPs and might best be tackled by trade associations or other groups where ISPs collaborate.

This is a product that could be sold in large quantities today if it was ready as an off-the-shelf application that could be sold to an individual user. It’s unlikely the need for supporting working from home is going to go away, so ISPs ought to do what they’ve always done and find trustworthy solutions their customers need and want.