My personal policy regarding employment is that I never do business with anybody that is within a thousand miles of where I live. I avoid a lot of face-to-face meetings that way, and yes, I have occasionally attended high-level conferences via phone in my bathrobe.

But I do rely heavily on email and VPN connections to communicate with the dozen or so different companies I work for, and this is something that email admins and other network honchos have historically had a problem with. They rightfully want to have control over every aspect of their network, but in this desire, they sometimes mistakenly believe that for them to have control over something, it has to be within the physical boundaries of the enterprise. Those who still believe this will quickly lose control of their networks—because the virtual enterprise is bursting out of its seams and the nature of work itself is changing.

It is certainly possible though, that someone telecommuting from a home computer could download some dangerous malware via email, which could then put corporate data in jeopardy when said telecommuter uses his or her VPN connection to link up to the home office. Clearly, security and use policies must be adapted to work in a telecommuting environment, especially if the computer being used for the connection is a home computer that is also designated for personal use. It’s very easy to implement and enforce a policy that says for example, corporate computers can’t download files from music sharing sites, but how to enforce that on a telecommuting worker—or worse yet, a telecommuting worker with teenagers at home?

An Ernst & Young study, “Risk at home: Privacy and Security Risks in Telecommuting,” found out that too many enterprises lack any formal telecommuting security policy, and that controls that are enforced in the workplace—such as file and email encryption–are seldom used at home. Those companies that must, by regulation or otherwise, archive all company data including emails, may also run into a grey area when telecommuters do business from home.