The ABCs of IVE: after an expensive, maintenance-laden VPN implementation, Finisar finds a simple, secure remote access solution - Cover Story - instant virtual extranet

Communications News,  Oct, 2002  

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When Patrick Wilson joined Sunnyale, CA-based Finisar Corp. in November 2000 as director of IT, he had a daunting task. Finisar's steadfast mission to apply digital fiber optics to a broad line of high-performance subsystems for networking and storage equipment manufacturers meant 350 employees needed access to corporate resources. The network, originally built to support 100 users, had only four remote access phone lines. The company was incurring up to $27,000 in monthly phone charges, and its employee base was growing 20% per quarter.

Wilson wondered, how he could quickly and easily provide hundreds of employees with remote access that required minimal future maintenance? How could he lessen administrative and support demands on a lean IT staff? And, how could he decrease the cost of remote access without risking security?

"Initially, we issued virtual private network (VPN) software clients to users at a cost of $16,000, not including installation and maintenance charges," Wilson says. "We also installed a VPN customer premise equipment device for 70 part-time, at-home employees for an additional $35,000."

Nine remote sites to Finisar headquarters were then connected via VPN tunneling hardware for $3,000 each. "Setting these up was relatively easy. Getting them to operate with different versions of DSL was a headache," Wilson says. "It took three months to determine the common denominator that could be deployed across all platforms and service providers."

These various VPN implementations, along with a global calling plan, opened up the possibility of remote access to infinite users. Recurring charges, however, ran $9,000 monthly. Concurrently, these scenarios introduced an entirely new set of problems.

"I spent 20% of my time on VPN problems," says Wilson, "with a full-time employee covering VPN support--valuable time needed to upgrade company infrastructure in order to continue on a fast-growth path. Security was a primary concern because whoever could get on the VPN could get right into the heart of our network. Our value-add to the business community is our IP, and that could be stolen via a LAN connection."

Another drawback was that the VPN client devices needed physical upgrades as changes occurred, each with a downtime of three to five days per user. When multiplied by 1,000 employees, Finisar faced a significant reduction in productivity and dollar loss.

"Off-site upgrades," Wilson says, "including international, required flying a support person to each remote location, further increasing costs and driving down time for needed infrastructure improvements. For the software clients, users had to disable the VPN client when they returned to the office or they could not log onto the Finisar LAN, often resulting in calls or visits to the IT department."

INTRO TO IVE TECHNOLOGY

What turned the situation around for Wilson was a meeting led by Frank Levinson, Finisar's CTO, who launched the company in 1987 with $60,000. Today, the $150-million-dollar company provides fiber-optic subsystems and network performance systems that enable high-speed data communications over Gigabit Ethernet LANs, Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) and metropolitan area networks (MANs).

On behalf of a venture capitalist, Levinson--a prominent physicist with numerous patents in fiber optics, lasers, networks and telephony--was looking at Neoteris' instant virtual extranet (IVE) technology and asked Wilson to join him. "I could see immediately how it could solve our administrative problems," says Wilson. "I wanted it ASAP."

Neoteris' PartnerAccess IVE appliance now provides secure access to corporate resources for Finisar's remote, mobile and telecommuting workers, and also offers its partners access with a secure partner extranet. Wilson centrally defines differentiated access control policies for subgroups of partner users.

After a week of testing the Neoteris appliance, Finisar began rolling out remote access to 900 of its 1,750 employees. Their access is to specified common applications such as the intranet and common Internet file system shares via a secure socket layer-enabled Web connection, using any device with an Internet browser and connection. The setup reduces costs by eliminating client software deployment, support and capital expenses, as well as telecommunication service fees.

IVE EASE OF USE

"The IVE enables quick deployment of all Web-based applications," Wilson offers, "including custom applications developed for quality control and assurance, engineering and finance, to be shared among all users, especially those on the road."

Because employees can gain secure access to corporate network resources from any standard Web browser, materials engineering is now empowered to upload drawings and information when needed, instead of waiting for those to be e-mailed to them.

If a Finisar salesperson's laptop is lost on the way to a client, or if employees need information during an off-site meeting, they can use any computer with a Web browser and access any information needed. Accidental deletions of files can be retrieved quickly and easily from the Finisar backup server. If the VPN network goes down in the manufacturing plant in Malaysia, its people can switch to the IVE to get what they need.