Telecommuting security concerns grow

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April 18, 2006 (Network World) -- Telecommuting is becoming a way of life as more companies let employees work from home to do jobs that might otherwise be done on corporate premises. As a result, IT managers are adapting security policies to encompass home PCs.

Last year an estimated 8.9 million people worked from home three or more days each month during regular business hours, according to IDC. A quarter of them worked exclusively from home. 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.

"We have a fair number of employees who are telecommuters," says Dan Lukas, lead security architect at Wisconsin-based Aurora Health Care, which operates 13 hospitals and dozens of clinics and has about 25,000 employees. "We're driven by the business, not the technology."

Several hundred Aurora employees work from home transcribing voice recordings made by physicians regarding their patients. 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.

The ranks of Aurora telecommuters also include radiologists, who can access the network to look at medical images.

Kettering Medical Center Network, a group of five hospitals in Dayton, Ohio, with 7,000 employees and 1,200 physicians, is one of many hospitals that are seeing growth in telecommuting.

"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.

According to IDC, health care is the industry in which telecommuting is most common, followed by the science and technical services market, and manufacturing.

Lukas says Aurora transcriptionists who telecommute are given PCs with a standard image with hospital applications and security tools, such as antivirus software. They also are required to use secure VPN access.

Aurora is migrating from a Cisco Systems Inc. IPSec VPN to a Juniper Networks Inc. SSL VPN, because the latter doesn't require special agent-based software to deploy.

Aurora's IT staffers coordinate with a business manager in charge of telecommuters' assignments to ensure they have access only to the database resources they require.

Another group of Aurora telecommuters, teleradiologists, may be called upon at home to examine medical images stored in Aurora's multigigabyte storage-area networks and server-based repositories.

Since remote access is a critical part of Aurora's daily operation, the company installed Atlanta-based Lancope Inc.'s StealthWatch intrusion-prevention system to repel denial-of-service attacks and break-in attempts.

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