"Nothing resides on the mobile units," McNulty said. "Everything resides back here in head office, so peace of mind is there for them in that respect."

In Western Canada, the province of Alberta's Sustainable Resources Development department uses GoBook XR-1 notebooks manufactured by General Dynamics Itronix Corp., along with NetMotion Inc.'s Mobility XE mobile VPN.

SRD, which has the authority to decide where roads can be built, trees can be cut and oil wells can be drilled, has about 100 mobile employees and plans to start training 50 more in a few weeks to use these devices, which connect to Global Positioning System satellites. When SRD staff inspect sites, they need manuals, regulations, industrial disposition files and maps -- sometimes up to 25 files per day with up to 30 GB of data.

In the past, the government used VPNs from Sierra Wireless and Nortel Networks, but those products did not have the same lockdown capabilities as NetMotion, said John Ivanc, systems analyst with the SRD's Information, Communications and Technology Group.

"If we wanted to say they could only use Notepad, they would only be able to use Notepad," he said. "With NetMotion we have the ability to lock down what the user has access to. You can go to the point where they only have access to a certain application by the time of day. It just has a lot of security options that we can implement that says they have access to this but not that. They can have access to Outlook and the Web but nothing else."