Security Manager's Journal: When taking time off is no vacation

Computerworld -

Trouble Ticket

• At issue: A family crisis pulls our manager across the country.
• Action plan: Do all she can before she goes, and keep connected while away.

If you've been reading this column over the past couple of months, you know that my general theme is that I lack the time, money and resources to get everything done that I need to do. The last thing you would expect to hear from me is that I'm taking time off.

In three and a half years of working for this state agency, I haven't had a real vacation. But much as I'd love to spend time on a warm beach somewhere, I couldn't really enjoy that right now. I would be too burdened with guilt about how much work I'd be leaving my staff buried in.

No, my time-off request was prompted by something far more pressing than the need for a break. My dad, an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist, was diagnosed a year ago with "cognitive impairment," a nice way of saying "Alzheimer's." Now my mom plans to move them across the country to be closer to me. It's a big undertaking, and she already has her hands full taking care of Dad. She needs my help.

Of course, I still have to maintain the security infrastructure. Before I went on leave, I worked a lot of hours trying to get ahead on my project schedule. It's amazing what you can do when you lock yourself up in a lab, ignore e-mail and mute the cell phone.

In fact, by the time I left, I had managed to get two months ahead of schedule. With no time for chit-chat, I condensed my responses to questions and requests, even from my boss. I checked voice mail and e-mail when I woke up each morning, in the middle of the day and when I got home. If a message wasn't urgent, I ignored it or passed it along to someone on my staff.

I will also be working remotely from my parents' home. I've never had a problem burning the midnight oil, and Mom and Dad do a lot of sleeping. But I would love advice on the best way to connect to our security labs.

We have two labs, at opposite ends of the state. They're on a subnet that's separate from the production network. I work primarily in one lab and remotely log into the other, relying on a tech when something has to be rack-mounted, physically rebooted or moved. This has been working out just fine.

Remote Chances

I want to be sure that I connect to the labs in the most secure manner when I'm across the country. I use a laptop with broadband wireless and access the state network with a Cisco VPN client. I use terminal services to log into my computer in either security lab via the IP address. That computer will not allow anyone else to log in, with the exception of a domain administrator.