Homeworkers have been encouraged to keep security high up on their list of priorities.

Politicians and business leaders have been calling for an increase in flexible working in order to help promote productivity and improve employee satisfaction at a time when pay rises are scarce.

However, as employees start to take advantage of the new options available to them, IT departments are racing to provide the facilities to keep things running smoothly.

With so much to deal with there is some worry that security issues might not be picked up. A recent report from BT highlighted two areas that are thought to be particularly problematic: network intrusion and infection; and data theft and loss.

Suitable firewall management, remote device control and the usual systems to take care of viruses and spam email, are the main areas that need to be focused on in order to provide a safe homeworking environment for the employee’s machine and the company’s networks and data systems as a whole.

Once these basics are in place, homeworkers can liase with IT departments to ensure that the context of their employment is taken into account when negotiating security boundaries.