July 2000 - Cover Story Road Warriors Run Rampant Laptop use and risks rise with mobile workforce advancement Mobility promises freedom to many of today s corporate workers. While travelling for pleasure or profession, an enterprise s road warriors need only their cell phones to call into the office to retrieve voicemail messages and check stocks. Better yet, a laptop is quite a handy tool for the remote user or traveller in facilitating access to corporate networks to obtain all sorts of information. To be wire-less is to be free free to do what one desires and, at the same time, what one needs to get done.
Laptops are convenient little devices, true.
They can, however, cause an employee and employers great pains fiscally and otherwise. Just ask the US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an intense examination into the January disappearance of a state department laptop, confirmed to have held highly classified information. The FBI is trying to determine whether the laptop was stolen or simply lost. As a result of this and other embarrassing security breaches for the federal agency, some members of the House of Representatives, including Chair of the House International Relations Committee Benjamin Gilman, have been leading hearings into what they consider to be lacking security controls in the department.