Going Global and Green with Innovation in Teleworking

By The CIO Leadership Forum staff

With skyrocketing gas prices and growing corporate focus on green initiatives, the demand for a collaboration-rich teleworker solution is becoming more critical in the quest to attract and retain top industry talent while embracing environmental responsibility. Companies that embrace teleworking can help reduce reliance on nonrenewable oil resources and substantially reduce commuter-generated carbon emissions. The right teleworking solution also benefits the business by lowering real estate and travel costs and maintaining business continuity in the event of a disaster or pandemic.

Cisco has long recognized the benefits of supporting remote workers, contributing to its number-six ranking on Fortune Magazine's list of "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2008. Cisco teleworkers report that they are 10 to 40 percent more productive daily, and enjoy better work-life balance than their non-telecommuting counterparts. While productivity gains are an obvious advantage, supporting remote workers, especially within global enterprises, can quickly consume significant time from IT support personnel.

To support its growing constituency of teleworkers, Cisco first used a software-based VPN client, and later deployed a hardware VPN solution. Neither approach scaled effectively to provide an enterprise-class solution for extending the enterprise to wherever the employee needed to work. In addition, the usage and costs of landline and mobile phones in the home office increased, and employees lacked a complete suite of remote access productivity tools.

To face these challenges head-on, Cisco IT partnered with Cisco's security technology product development team to develop the Enterprise Class Teleworker (ECT) solution. ECT is an always-on, secure, remote connectivity service that uses ubiquitous broadband Internet access to establish a VPN connection from a home or remote office to the Cisco corporate network. This innovative solution literally extends the enterprise network, along with comprehensive data, voice, and video conferencing services, into the employee's home or remote office. By using zero touch deployment, it has actually reduced the costs of providing these services that dramatically improve the employee's work experience.

CIO Magazine recently recognized the ECT solution with its CIO 100 award, which is given to 100 companies that are using IT in innovative ways to deliver a competitive advantage to the enterprise and enable growth. Through the collaborative efforts of Cisco IT and the security technology product team, Cisco has also enhanced its security product offerings to incorporate lessons learned from the ECT solution.

ECT uses a Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) to extend Unified Communications services to the home office, including secure corporate WLAN connectivity, voice over IP, and video conferencing services. The network is the platform used to deliver reusable network-based services, such as security, that can be used by applications such as Unified Communications throughout the enterprise.

Using a web-based service request application, users can provision their ECT router, IP phone, or video conferencing equipment and request, update, or cancel their ECT service subscriptions without requiring IT engineer intervention. To maximize service performance, the ECT router located in the home office connects to the nearest ECT hub gateway located at Cisco sites around the world. Once connected, employees can communicate and collaborate with colleagues worldwide over the Cisco network, improve productivity, and enjoy work-life flexibility.

Delivering More Services for Less

Although ubiquitous broadband connectivity enabled Cisco IT to readily deploy, manage, and audit multiple services to home offices, adding more services while reducing operating costs and maintaining corporate information security was a difficult challenge. The team responded by integrating devices and services, strategically reusing available architectural components, and revolutionizing the deployment, configuration, and management of end-user devices with automated processes, transforming the offering from a technology-specific service to a service-oriented delivery model.

Cisco IT implemented secure, zero touch deployment (ZTD) models that reduce the initial deployment cost of offering secure data, corporate wireless, voice over IP, and video conferencing services. The ZTD models have reduced per-unit provisioning costs, while allowing the ECT solution to scale in order to support the ultimate user base of 35,000 teleworkers.

ZTD does not require any specific technical knowledge or training and takes less than five minutes from start to finish. The user simply launches a web browser and inputs valid user credentials. Once the process is initiated, end-to-end information security is maintained over encrypted links, and security policies and service details are deployed, managed, and audited from central management equipment. Separate ZTD provisioning models are used for routers, IP telephony, and video conferencing.

Positive Returns

The ECT solution has delivered a host of financial, productivity, preparedness, and green benefits throughout the global enterprise. The ZTD process dramatically reduces the number of engineers required to manually configure equipment and accounts and the time each user spends to set up an ECT service. With ECT adoption targets of 26,000 users over two years, ZTD cost savings are projected to reach US$2.5M.

As ECT adoption rises, Cisco will also achieve savings from those employees who expense their home phone lines. By simply adopting voice over IP and using their Cisco IP phone at home to call anywhere globally, employees will help the company save $665,000 annually.

Beyond operational and cost benefits, ECT has changed the way other Cisco organizations work. For example, Cisco's customer support organization, the Technical Assistance Center (TAC), has begun globally adopting ECT to help ensure it can continue operations in the event of a local, regional, or national workforce disruption such as extreme weather, natural disaster, or medical pandemic. In fact, ECT has already enabled the TAC to more than double its workforce continuity preparedness from 33 percent prepared to 68 percent prepared, and estimates that it will soon be over 90 percent prepared.

Finally, by extending the enterprise to remote employees, Cisco is significantly reducing its carbon footprint. Based on results from a comprehensive survey of ECT users, the average user avoids 5,306 commuting miles per year, saving an estimated 265 gallons of gas per year (assessed at 20 mpg), and reducing their automobile's carbon dioxide output by 2.6 metric tons per year. Collectively, 9,500 ECT users avoid commuting nearly 48 million miles annually and reduce their automotive carbon emissions by 23,000 metrics tons per year.

Investing in the Future

With more than 63,000 employees and offices on every major continent, Cisco is using the ECT solution to support its globalization and collaboration efforts while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions. Employees can now collaborate across continents and time zones by extending or flexibly arranging their days to work from home when international meetings fall outside normal business hours. They can also stay connected from home when severe weather, a natural disaster, or other emergency prevents them from getting to the office.

Although several alternative approaches were evaluated and discarded along the way, the ECT solution has been a resounding success. The program has increased employee collaboration, productivity, and morale, while supporting globalization efforts, reducing costs, and contributing to Cisco's corporate green initiative for carbon reduction.