Telecommuting is taking off. It seems I have been reading that for years, but more and more I run into people that are at least able to telecommute part of the time for their jobs. There are still lots of people that don't telecommute at all, especially in Information Technology, but I do think more and more businesses are becoming open to the idea that some portion of their workforce going about their daily tasks from a remote location.
And that means security is a bigger issue. I ran into this short piece on two ways to provide security for home workers and found it interesting. It mentions VPNs with network access controls as one solution and remote terminals as the second solution. Both of these can work, but both can also be complex to implement.
The lines between what is private and what is corporate are blurring often on our machines, just as the line between private time and company time is hard to discern. No matter what your company policy is, chances are that for IT workers, some of their personal life will bleed onto their corporate hardware. That's even more of an issue when you have people working at home.
While the infrastructure people will concern themselves about good network security, I think it's important that DBAs question the data security as well. Is database access protected? Can the user download and save critical data to their machines? Is any encryption employed? It's important to ask the questions and be sure that those involved with securing corporate systems are aware of potential data security issues.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
- Windows Media Podcast - 20.4MB WMV
- iPod Video Podcast - 14.9MB MP4
- MP3 Audio Podcast - 3.5MB MP3
The podcast feeds are available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com. Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there. Overall RSS Feed:
or now on iTunes!
Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
You can also follow Steve Jones on Twitter:
