IT managers say key concern is ensuring telecommuters’ PCs keep pace with corporate security guidelines. Telecommuting has become a way of life as more companies let employees work from home to do jobs that might otherwise be done on corporate premises. Last year an estimated 8.9 million telecommuters worked from home three or more days each month during regular business hours, according to IDC. At places where home-based work has become the norm, IT managers say a key concern is ensuring each telecommuter’s PC – typically granted remote access to a corporate LAN – keeps pace with office security guidelines. According to IDC, healthcare is the industry in which telecommuting is most common, followed by the science and technical services arena, and manufacturing. The financial-services industry is stepping gingerly into telecommuting, with IT managers aware that government regulators and auditors will want to know about security controls on home-based computers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“We have a fair number of employees who are telecommuters,” says Dan Lukas, lead security architect at Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin, which operates 13 hospitals and dozens of clinics and has about 25,000 employees. These transcriptionists, situated all over the country, then remotely access Aurora’s private-line network over the Internet to file each transcribed recording with a patient’s online medical records. “More and more, physicians want access to their offices from home, and we’re giving radiologists secure access so they can read images from home,” says Bob Burritt, Kettering Medical Center Network’s director of technology.<\/p>\n
Lukas says Aurora transcriptionists who telecommute are given PCs with a standard image on them for hospital applications and security, such as anti-virus. The hospital is migrating from a Cisco IPSec VPN to a Juniper SSL VPN, because it doesn’t require special agent-based software to deploy. <\/p>\n
Despite the industry buzz about automated procedures for checking a user’s anti-virus and patch updates before granting network access, Lukas says Aurora officials, who recently tested Cisco’s Network Admission Control products, believe that for the moment it’s not a mature technology and is too expensive.<\/p>\n
Consultant Tom Walsh recommends that organizations adopting telecommuting equip at-home employees with dedicated PCs to be used for work only.<\/p>\n
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