Companies have embraced the Work from Home (WFH), or work hybrid model that many have decided to keep these avenues for their employees. Employers have found that employees are not only thankful but working successfully. The ability to not only stay safe but also have a better work/life balance has given employees a new vigor for work and an enthusiasm to stay at their current company.
As an employer, it might be a little scary at first trying to figure out how to support and maintain your employees’ access to internal networks and devices. Thankfully, No-IP has some products and features that can help:
Enhanced Managed DNS Service
First thing is first: you will need to make sure there are enough hostnames for your employees to access your devices such as your Network Access Storage (NAS) or internal network server. Whether you have a number of employees ready to access these devices remotely, or you are anticipating a growing number of employees that will soon need access, it is good practice to have these things in place and the ability to add users quickly so that no one experiences any downtime. Although No-IP has a robust free package with lots of great features, Enhanced Dynamic DNS and Plus Managed DNS packages allow you to create additional host names as your company grows so you are only paying for what you need. Not only will you have a means of access for your employees to access internal data, but you also have a means of ensuring they will always be connected.
DNS Monitoring
Although this service is typically used for businesses that want to ensure that their sites are up and accessible to customers, it can certainly be applied to ensuring your employees have access as well. Monitoring is fairly simple: It works by checking your web services remotely. If the monitoring service can get to your site, database, FTP server, etc., and verify it’s working, Monitoring will log its result and continue. Should it get a bad response from your service, or a slow response, Monitoring will then notify you of the problem. No-IP offers basic and advanced monitoring packages that you can pick between depending on what you’re looking for. The Advanced Monitoring service offers enhanced features the Basic package provides, AND Failover Support. The Failover Support is the key feature for Advanced Monitoring – Should your service go down you can have all your traffic diverted to another IP address, website, or to a custom web page stored on No-IP’s servers. When your service comes back up online, Monitoring will undo the failover settings and normal operations will continue. When you have employees working remotely and around the clock, ensuring they have access is not just necessary, it is crucial.
Load Balancing
If you find yourself running a company that is getting a lot of traffic due to more remote users trying to access your servers or customers visiting your site, then you would be a perfect fit for Round Robin DNS. This type of advanced record is used by companies with a lot of users and customers clamoring into their servers. Instead of bogging down one IP address, you can route different users or customers to different IP addresses and thus balancing the load of traffic. Load balancing is a way of managing, but also preventing any IP network issues caused by the rush of traffic.
No-IP Special Features:
Some of the best WFH aspects of No-IP come from our basic features:
Unlimited Queries
Texting these days is one of the basic ways we keep in touch with anyone from friends and family to work or even your doctor’s office. Texting has been such a common way for us to communicate with one another that it is almost unfathomable that we all used to pay for each text sent and received! Slowly, but surely, phone companies have increased the limit of texts a person could send in a pay cycle until unlimited texting became not only the norm but the standard. The same goes for queries to your devices. It would be counterintuitive if you told your remote employees to work within the confines of a number of queries to your servers, which might be like limiting the number of times you want customers to visit your site. With unlimited queries, you don’t have to worry about any repercussions about the number of queries so long as your servers can handle the traffic. This is a breath of fresh air considering there are a lot of other companies that seem to still be practicing the “old texting” method with customers.
Data Privacy
Privacy is crucial when thinking about your internal data, especially if you have employees accessing it remotely numerous times a day. There are a number of cloud server companies that also provide Managed DNS services. In the short term, this may be convenient for you and your employees to have one place to store and access your internal data. However, passing data through a cloud server means your data is stored and potentially accessed through security breaches, thus putting your company, and your employees, at risk. At No-IP, we merely serve as the connection between you, your users, and your IP network – That is it. Therefore, your data stays secure and private.
As we embrace remote work to be a common way of being part of the workforce, we can do so with the right tools to set us all up for success. Turning toward the leaps and bounds that technology has to offer and the limitless possibilities can only make us more hopeful for the future.