Home Computer Security Patch Options For Corporate Security Managers.

For the purposes of this paper, I'm interested in people who use their home computers to connect to a corporate LAN via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel over a residential broadband Internet connection. The principles discussed will apply to any remotely connected user allowed to access protected systems behind a firewall, but to keep the paper concise we'll focus on residential home-based VPN users. Users connecting through dial-up modems are being excluded from this paper because the bandwidth available to them while connected make remote patching impractical. Furthermore, reduction in available dialup bandwidth would seriously hamper users' ability to perform any of their intended tasks.1