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When on the road, nearly everyone likes to bring along something special from home. Pictures of loved ones, a favorite pillow, a book or entertainment for a long flight, and for users of information technology, they want to be able to conveniently and securely access their work files wherever they go. Their productivity depends on it.
Traveling users are not a new phenomenon. Whether corporate or government in nature, large organizations are likely to be geographically dispersed with multiple remote locations, and will have numerous users that regularly travel to these locations.
The Challenge
For both security and convenience purposes, more IT groups are adopting the practice of establishing user home directories which can include redirected folders such as the My Documents folder, and roaming user profiles on a file server at each user's assigned home office. This makes it convenient for users to login and store working files where they will be secured and backed up on a regular basis. But, what happens when these users go on the road?
A challenge comes into play when users travel between locations, especially to remote sites with marginal connectivity back to their home directory server.
These users may experience slow access to their files, and visiting desktop users may have a difficult time logging in. And to make matters even worse, some users will compensate by storing and accessing their work files via local storage, flash drives or cloud-based storage services, each with their own security, governance and data integrity related concerns.
Ideally, you would prefer a solution that can maintain the security and convenience of your single sign-on system while providing a synchronized copy of a user's home directory on servers they can access locally at LAN speed when they travel. This will also save them the extra steps of trying to connect to their home office by VPN along with other gymnastics such as mapping a drive from the local machine they are working on to their home directory, all just to ensure the integrity and continuity of their home directory while on the road.
Solving Home Directory Sync
If this scenario sounds familiar, then please take a look at PeerSync, the industry standard for bi-directional file replication and synchronization in WAN environments. For user home directory synchronization, PeerSync ensures that users have local access to their home directories at LAN speed regardless of which facility they are accessing their information from, all while maintaining an exact replica on all servers, including the one at the home office. PeerSync is fast, seamless and proven, and most importantly for users visiting remote locations, it is resilient. It gracefully handles marginal and slow WAN connections, ensuring that user home directory data is up-to-date and available.
PeerSync is a great solution for supporting your road warriors, and helping to keep them at peak productivity.
