Also with the issue of telecommuting comes the issue of security. The opening up of an organisation's information system to dial-in and other forms of access presents significant security risks.
One risk is that intruders will be able to access corporate systems without having to be on site. In addition to intruders whose goal may be mischief, hacking is attractive to people trying to steal or misuse corporate information. Another risk of telecommuting is that corporate information can be read, and potentially modified, while it is being transmitted.
To curb this, a business can have the following solution. They could use a secure gateway, called a firewall which blocks or filters access between two networks, often between a private network and a larger, more public network such as the Internet or public switched network. For telecommuting, organisations must decide what to make available to telecommuting employees using public networks, what degree to ensure that only authorised users can get to the internal network, and how to ensure that the secure gateway works properly.
The stakeholders with this issue are the business and the employee. With the breach of security, company files could be read or obtained. Information could be leaked which could affect the reputation of the company and the employees. However, the most affected would be the telecommuter as it would be his/her’s fault for not securing the system. As a result the employee would lose their job.
The last issue with telecommuting is the issue of Integrity. Other members of the employee's household may wish to use the computer used for telecommuting. Children, spouses, or other household members may corrupt files, introduce viruses accidently. In this case, the employee would be accountable, as they should have secured the data from others. With tampered data, the integrity is lost and the business could lose precious information- i.e. economic or private information. They could even lose money if the data is extremely important.
However, the integrity of data can be kept if the business implements some ground rules. Firstly, the company could hold the employee responsible for the integrity and confidentiality of the data. If the employee does not do this with utmost care then they would be fired. Obviously, if the data is highly confidential, this is not a good choice. Another option is to use a removable hard drives. If corporate data is stored on a removable hard drive, the risk is greatly reduced as a backup copy cannot be tampered with, and is not easily found if kept safe. The final option that the business could implement would be using data encryption. This protects confidentiality while detecting changes to files. Only the business members would be able to decrypt this file; however they must be trustworthy for the data to be fully secured.
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