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It's long been known to expert network administrators that most nefarious software and malware infiltrate your production network not through holes in your firewall, or brute-force password attacks or anything else that might occur at your corporate headquarters or campus.

Rather, they gain access to your wires through your mobile users when they try to connect to your business network while on the road. There's a big problem with remote users, and it hinges on the unpredictability of the machines from which they're connecting.

Most remote users are authenticated and allowed access to your network only on the basis of their identity. They can prove that they are who they say they are, and that's good enough for a lot of deployments. But problematically, no effort is made to verify that their hardware and software on their machines meets a certain baseline requirement. Remote users could, and do every day, fail any or all of the following common-sense guidelines for very basic computer security:

- The latest service pack and the latest security hot fixes are installed.