The organisational standpoint
In India, few can even distinguish what telecommuting is and often confuse it with freelancing. When we talked to several professionals for this article, they said they telecommute occasionally, only to find out that what they were referring to was freelancing.
But most Indian IT corporates such as Infosys and Wipro, prefer to keep away from telecommuting. Chairman Narayana Murthy has cited low teledensity and slow Internet access speeds as the main reason why Infosys prefers not to offer a telecommuting option for their employees.
Slow dial-up connections, low PC penetration and Internet connectivity are obvious reasons why telecommuting is failing to take off in India. It's also on the decline even in countries like the US where it is easy and fairly inexpensive to have a high-bandwidth connection at home like DSL or cable modem.
Maintenance of machines in remote locations, for example updating machines with current software, patches, is easy to do with users in one location on a LAN but difficult with telecommuters who use a dial-up to access the Net from home.
Data and network security is the biggest challenge for organisations that provide remote access to sensitive information online. Without a personal firewall, a telecommuter's computer at home is an open invitation for hackers to access information off the home hard drive or use it to find their way to break into the corporate network.
At home, antivirus software tends to be less rigorously updated, and encryption, is generally neglected. The recent Microsoft hack attack via a pilfered telecommuter ID in October was a wake-up call for a growing number of corporate security managers and organisations.
The solution to this could be to formulate a strict remote access policy, which tells telecommuters what they can and cannot do on their machines and how to physically protect them like storing confidential files on servers, and encrypting sensitive documents.
"We have taken safeguards such that only managers can avail of this facility as of now and connection is through a secure server," says Srivastava. "Passwords are given to a select group only," he added.
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