Cisco launches Virtual Office for companies with remote workers.(IMG:Cisco)

Cisco is offering a new means to secure remote workers. Cisco Virtual Office aims to extend the productivity, security, and scope of enterprise IT to workers who are frequently choosing to work from home.

Not only security centric, Cisco Virtual Office has some green in it as well. Lowering the carbon footprint is a huge deal recently in IT.

"The Cisco Virtual Office is ultimately about helping extend secure mobility and empowering the collaborative workforce wherever and whenever it connects," said Marie Hattar, VP of Network Systems and Security Solutions at Cisco. "It enhances the benefits of remote working by providing office-caliber technology wrapped in a security blanket. It allows businesses to stay agile, and in some cases, it can provide an environmentally friendly alternative to commuting while managing operational expenses at corporate sites."

Cisco Virtual Office packages routing, switching, security, wireless, IP telephony, and policy control technology that is centrally managed offering up highly secure video, voice, data, and wireless service.

The standout feature is its "zero-touch" setup. “Automated, pre-configured setup offloads installation responsibilities from employees, most of whom are not qualified or knowledgeable enough to implement networking systems themselves,” explains Cisco.

Virtual Office is compromised of the new Cisco 881w Series Internet Services Router (ISR) with “zero-touch” and Cisco 7970G IP phone, this makes up the remote portion.

At the main office, IT will need to deploy a Cisco 7200 Series router to serve as a converged platform for VPN, offering the encryption and security required to make the effort worthwhile. The 7200 utilizes Cisco Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Networking (DMVPN), which secures the exchange of data between two locations.

Management servers for policy, identity and configuration, are also needed at the main office. This includes the Cisco Configuration Engine for image distribution to as many as 10,000 Cisco Integrated Services Routers, Cisco Security Manager for management of security policies, and Cisco Secure Access Control Server (ACS), which provides access policy control.

American Century Investments (ACI), an investment management company based in Kansas City, Missouri, has been using Cisco Virtual Office for some time. To date, ACI has rolled out Cisco Virtual Office to more than 110 of its sales agents and remote workers.

Cisco also uses the Virtual Office. The company said that more than 12,000 of its own employees use the platform, and in 2009 Cisco plans to increase adoption to 20,000 users. By 2010, it expects to have deployed the solution to 30,000 of its employees globally. Cisco says costing starts at about $700 USD per seat.