Concerns about having enough people in offices to handle public demand is the top barrier to adopting work-at-home programs, with 73 percent of the 78 agencies that participated in a survey by the office. Next is an organizational culture bias against telecommuting with 54 percent, followed by resistance from agency management with 52 percent. Security came in fourth with 44 percent citing that as a barrier.

The top four responses to these hurdles are training managers, training workers who telecommute, spending more on equipment and bolstering in-house marketing programs to make telecommuting seem more attractive.

The prime motivation for encouraging telecommuting for federal workers remainsdisaster recovery, which raises a whole separate set of concerns for government IT security planners. Not only will devices used at home have to be protected, but so will the applications they are accessing, and that set of accessible applications can change dramatically with a sudden spike of home workers resulting from an emergency. Possible scenarios include disasters that destroy government offices, transportation disruptions and widespread epidemics that quarantine the workforce.

That will mean somehow securely admitting workers to sensitive servers formerly banned from use by remote workers, Commerce Department CISO Michael Castagna said at a recent Telework Exchange forum.

"It's going to force us to rethink security on the fly," he said.