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CHAPTER 1 Networking and Security: Trends and Challenges 7 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Remote offices The days of employees working together in the same place — company headquarters — are long gone. As organizations expand into new markets, acquiring smaller companies and their office footprints, the number of remote and branch offices grows, too. For the average enterprise, remote or satellite offices generate most of the revenue — research from Enterprise Strategy Group suggests that 80 percent of users are located in remote or branch offices. These users need to be protected as well as their coun- terparts at main office locations, even if their network traffic is going directly to the Internet instead of backhauling to the cor- porate data center. A remote or branch office is a dedicated business (non-home) site that has more than one employee. This location may be connected to a central data center via a wide-area network (WAN) or may connect directly to the Internet. Remote and branch offices typi- cally receive some level of technology support from headquar- ters locations and most (although not all) typically have one or more on-site servers to provide users with file, print, and other IT services. Some remote office locations may be connected to a main office over a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) WAN link. However, it is becoming more common for remote offices to connect to the main office over a virtual private network (VPN) via a direct Inter- net access (DIA) link, or to have a secondary DIA link to serve as a backup to the primary MPLS link. As companies become more decentralized, the growing popula- tion of remote workers and branch offices need a new approach to networking and security. Roaming users Laptop computers have supplanted desktop computers to become the primary endpoint for many business users. Similarly, mobile computing has untethered workers as mobile devices have become more powerful than many desktop computers and their use has proliferated. Because of these technology trends, most work can now be performed from practically anywhere and modern orga- nizations increasingly recognize that work is an activity, not a place. According to the Enterprise Strategy Group, 50 percent