Airports, coffee shops, hotels and more now offer free internet access to the harried business traveler, yet this very customer friendly interface can open up your organization to a serious security breach and a considerable loss of business information.  And your employee's persnal information!

A survey of 14 US airports and 3 Asian ones by AirTight Networks found that 57% of them were wide open--no security at all for its users (BusinessWeek, March 24, 2008).  An additional 28% were protectged by the easily broken WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocols while only 15% used the stronger security protocol called WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access).

What this means is that everytime your employees fire up their laptops or handhelds and access the internet, their personal information and your critical business information can be easily snatched and used against you.

The key solution is to ensure your organization requires all travelers to conduct business using VPN (virtual private network) connections because it provides end-to-end encryption of data.  Secure sites usually have an internet address that begins "https:".  If you use the FireFox browser, it designates secure connections with a gold address bar.

If you do not know how secure your business information is when your employees are travelling, now is the time to ask your IT folks to review its security protocols.