I have been a remote employee for over 10 years now and there are benefits to being a remote employee like working in your pajamas or doing laundry during my lunch hour. However, using VPN is not one of them.
Connecting to VPN can be as simple as a right mouse click and entering your user name and password. (if you can remember it) Once you’re connected as long as your internet access stays at 100% functionality you can work for hours. But in my experience there are multiple times during the day when internet access isn’t connecting at 100% which means you drop your VPN connection. Of course you don’t realize this until your most important client says “I’m no longer seeing your screen”. Once you get this you need to pray that your internet connectivity is back up to VPN’s expectations and that you can log back in quickly. I have had many unproductive lay-overs due to the fact that my VPN won’t allow me access due to security set-up which means, I can’t access anything.
After joining PEI it didn’t take me long to appreciate DIRECTACCESS! I turn on my PC and guess what? I’m connected. I didn’t have to click on anything, I didn’t have to enter in my password AGAIN and I don’t lose connectivity. Not to mention the fact that accessing or downloading a document from my corporate office is so fast it’s like I have it saved on my own PC. I have yet to get the famous message that I need to turn off my firewall before I can connect to something. If I do actually take a lunch and walk away to change our my laundry I don’t have to log onto my PC and then log into DirectAccess I’m automatically connected once I log into my PC.
Long story short…DirectAccess is a remote employees dream!
Lisa Probst, PEI
