Network Defend

By now I am sure you have all heard about the latest data theft fiasco with the Veterans Administration.  Some 26 million records were on a laptop that was stolen from an employees home.  There have been many other thefts from various financial and records warehousing organizations in the last two years, some made public, most not.

Without going into the argument about working beyond normal work hours, there IS a better way.  Don’t take the data home.  If you must work remotely, one solution is to use VPN combined with remote desktop.  It’s safer, typically much faster (you don’t need to transfer large amounts of data over a home broadband connection) and it keeps the data on the work computers where it belongs. 

My clients will recognize this method - since it’s the one that Network Defend has been implementing for all remote workers on networks we deploy.

For those unfamiliar with the process, here is a very high level overview:

Install a VPN Gateway at the business firewall layer.  Install and configure a VPN client on your remote workstation/laptop. This grants you access via secure VPN to your companies LAN.  Turn on Remote Desktop in Windows XP Professional or Windows 2003.  If required, have your network admin tweak domain policies to allow this feature.  Use strong passwords on your work domain account.  Turn off hibernation on the workstation. When you leave work, log off your work computer but leave it running.

From your remote site, log into your work LAN via VPN on your laptop or remote terminal.  Then open a Remote Desktop session over that connection.

There are very few modern applications that will not work this way, and since all data is kept at the work site, your tasks will run faster - and your data stays at work.  All you see at the remote site is a view of the data.