Nine-to-five is quickly becoming a quaint memory in many workplaces. Flex time, teleworkers, road warriors and home offices are increasingly blurring the distinction between "my time" and "work time." That means more work is done during off-hours but also that more "play" is done during work.

If my employees do a quick e-mail check after dinner to get ready for tomorrow's tasks, is it not also reasonable for them to check their eBay listing during the day? In a business driven by results and productivity, flexibility in the work hours usually benefits the employer just as much as the employee. But while employers might not worry about blurring the working hours, should they mind about employees using the same laptop for both work and play?

There are inherent risks in using the same computing environment for work and home. Does my home use of company equipment endanger the company? Or does my work computer endanger my online checking account? Either way, it is difficult to reconcile the security policies of one type of use with those of the other. In most cases home use may not have much of a security policy. In my case I face the opposite problem: I have to use my work computer to browse security sites for research. That puts my home use at risk more so than the other way around.

For the next generation of users, today's teenagers who become tomorrow's employees, the problem is even more complex — they comfortably switch not just between work and play but also between a dozen different online personas. Is it realistic to expect employees to keep home use on the home computer and work use on the work computer?

While most companies apply acceptable-use policies attempting to cleanly separate work from play, I expect that over time we will have to look at this problem from a new angle. Instead of trying to physically separate different use contexts, we should instead use virtualization on the desktop to logically separate contexts.

My work laptop contains an additional virtual machine that runs a full operating system for home use only. If I want to do online banking or order groceries online I do so from my home virtual machine. I use a VPN to direct all home-machine traffic to a server at home so that it all originates from my own broadband connection and not my employers network.

The next step is more interesting: Rather than having my home use in a virtual partition, I would prefer to have all my employees use a virtual machine for work. If I can put it on a secure USB stick, the work desktop becomes truly portable and can be used on any machine, whether provided by the employer or not. "Honey, are you at work at the moment?” – “Yes, virtually.”