Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams Audio and Video Split Tunnel Configuration
Your organization has selected a standard tool for collaboration. This could include, Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams. These platforms offer the ability to perform audio and video collaboration with multiple users and share files. Organizations that are focused on security (which should be all of them) will often route the data for the audio and video call from the user laptop through the corporate network to use the corporate internet. This path will allow the traffic to end up at the final destination for Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams.. For users that are working at home, sending the audio and video traffic from the user laptop back through the corporate network can add additional latency and impact the audio and video experience.
Improving the audio and video experience on Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams. requires that you implement a “Split Tunnel” configuration. A split tunnel configuration defines different routes for data and the Audio and Video traffic. This implementation will take the audio and video traffic and send it from the user laptop direct to Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams and bypass your corporate network. It is important to note that you only want to implement the change for audio and video traffic. Microsoft documents this as a best practice in their documentation title: Optimize Office 365 connectivity for remote users using VPN split tunneling
Prior to implementing this configuration, you will want to perform a test with a subset of users. Due to the fact that the users who work at home will benefit from this, you need to find a way to setup a dedicated VPN connection for them to test. You want the user to build a manual VPN connection and alleviate the nightmare with deploying a new VPN client with the test configuration. For the testing, you need to establish a centralized location for the users to report errors. If you have a collaboration tool that allows for different channels, then you could build a channel where the user can report the issue. You can assign your network team access to the channel so they can monitor and respond to the issues. This reporting structure will alleviate any additional burden on the help desk for user assistance.
Having completed testing with a subset of users, you will need to make a decision on whether you need more testing. If you need more testing, then the effort will need to commence to find a group of people that can setup their VPN client for the test. This could be a larger group of people, therefore you need to involve your HelpDesk and create the required Knowledge Base(KB) articles. Involving the Help Desk and sharing KB articles will minimize the amount of time that your team will be engaged in tracking the issues. The Help Desk will need training on what queue to record the issues.
Your testing needs to include every method the users execute to connect to the network and Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams. For VPN access this could include a dedicated client, or it could use a standard WebBrowser. You should run a report on the user desktop and the software that is available to them for VPN access. Confirm that the applications that should be used for VPN are being used and legacy applications are not in use.
Your risk with this deployment could include authentication issues. In the configuration, you need to make sure that the networks added for audio and video do not impact the authentication system that you have in place. In order to mitigate this risk, make sure you test from a non-corporate machine the ability to login to the collaboration tool environment.
Implementing a split tunnel for the audio and video is a great way to improve collaboration and reduce the load on your corporate internet network. In the deployment balance the testing against the motto to “Fail Early and Fail Fast” in order to roll this out quickly and find user issues.