Corporate Laptops using home cable modem

This is becoming a more common situation each day. Certainly you should require users to have firewall on their notebook computers. They also need to be running an up-to-date anti-virus product. Then you should install some sort of VPN client on their system that will allow them to have an encypted tunnel from their notebooks to the corporate network. What kind of access to uses have to their notebooks? Do they logon with admin rights, or only user-level rights. If the later, that helps mitigate the risk somewhat.

Whatever solution you devise, make sure any file coming over the VPN into your network is scanned for viruses, etc. before/while it is being saved onto a server.

* Why are they assigned laptops rather than Desktops?
* Do they travel for the company? How often?
* Do they stay at hotels with ability to connect to the internet? Modem? DSL? highspeed?
* Are you establishing a work-from-home project? Do you permit work at home?
* Are there corporate resources they can access over the Public internet?
* Does your Public site have a secured Employee entrance?
* Do you have a VPN established, or other private network over the public internet?
* What OSis running 2K, NT, XP, ME?
* How much resources, time would be required to establish multiple start-up configurations?
* Can you select a corporate standard Firewall? And will the company pay for it?

I am sure you can come up with many more -

Thus - Depending on the answers you should have your answer of Yea lets do it or Nay-its not worth the costs.

We here have established a VPN over the public network. Those that have travel laptops are set up for the ability to access the internet from anywhere by any means (personal isp or corporate). They have complete access to their resources just as if they were in the office ? secured ? and safe. (Firewalls, encryption and VPN).

A long time ago we established corporate standards and policies for this event (we seen it coming ? early warning from our advisory services), we selected ZoneAlarm Pro as the local laptop standard firewall, we wrote and established policies on using corporate equipment to access the internet off site, enforced viruses scanners, and other standards and guidelines. This simple little thing has increase staffs productivity and end-user satisfaction greatly. We are slowly killing the Big Brother stuff that is around here ? by proving security, productivity and cost effective returns for employee open access. We are also showing the staff we respect them as professionals at the same time.