There have been a few people at my office that have requested the installation of DropBox on their computers to synchronize files so they can work on them at home. I have always been wary about cloud computing, mainly because we are a Canadian company and enjoy the privacy and being outside the reach of the Patriot Act.

The policy before I started was that employees with company issued notebooks could be issued a VPN account, and everyone else had to have a remote desktop connection. The theory behind this logic (as I understand it) was that we had the potential to lock down the notebooks whereas the employees home computers were outside of our grasp. We had no ability to ensure they weren't running as administrator all the time / were running AV so they were a higher risk at being infected with malware and could compromise network security.

With the increase in people wanting DropBox I'm curious as to whether or not this policy is too restrictive and overly paranoid. Is it generally safe to provide VPN access to an employee without knowing what their computing environment looks like?