Why must VPN be such an issue in 2010

For some reason (actually I’m not sure there is a reason) the company I work for have decided that they’re going to use Juniper for their VPN. The problem with this is that, at home, I have 64bit Windows 7. Up until quite recently Juniper did not support Windows 7 and they didn’t support 64bit! Yeah I know that does seem a little… slow to react. 64 OSs have been around for quite some time, and being a developer I’m drawn towards the shiny new things, not to mention the fact that you need 64 windows in order to use more than 3GB of ram and with 4 or more Visual Studio instances open at once, plus a bunch of other applications that ram gets used up quickly. So I’ve been using 64bit for some time. Add in to that the fact that Windows 7 has been available for some time and you can see why I’m of the opinion that Juniper isn’t the greatest solution in the world.

What I don’t get is why. Why does my company need something like Juniper when a bog standard VPN connection is all they need. Windows has been capable of setting up a VPN connection since XP, could we just use that? Oh no, we need Juniper because then its possible to deny access if the users computer doesn’t have the latest Anti-Virus definitions, or isn’t fully patched. Well I’d imagine that for most users they wouldn’t know where to start with some of those requirements. I try to keep my PC updated, I’m not a big fan of anti-virus software because it takes up more resources than a virus usually and I’m savvy enough not to get infected (I think), I don’t open email attachments from people I don’t know, I don’t go surfing odd websites etc. Add to that the security enhancements in Windows recently and I think I’m pretty safe. Of course there will be exceptions to that and if someone really wants to do something nasty I’m sure there are ways to do that. But do I really want to waste those CPU cycles I paid for running some software just to make sure that some other software doesn’t do something on my computer…?

Anyhow turns out that not only does Juniper want my OS to be fully patched and that I must have anti virus on my computer but I also need to have java installed! Why on earth would I want to install Java? Along with Flash its one of the most godawful things going. But most importantly I just don’t need it or want it on my computer. I haven’t seen a useful Java ‘thing’ for ages (granted Oracle etc are written in it… but have you seen them?), and pretty much everything Java can do so can .NET and I’m a .NET developer. I know I should care about what ‘the opposition’ are up to… but honestly I don’t want it on my home pc.

This leaves me stuck when it comes to working from home. I can’t simply login like other people, if I need to work from home it looks like I’ve got 2 choices: Install Java or borrow a work laptop. I’m going to go down the work laptop route, that way they can manage the anti-virus and OS and Java stuff and I can have my nice clean pc nice and clean and to hell with the notion of productivity!