# Do home-office laptops need the NetSenX agent installed?

Not necessarily. If remote staff reach company systems only through a VPN, a sensor on a SPAN or TAP port behind the VPN gateway already sees what their laptops do on the internal network, which is where most damage is done, and that sensor counts as one device. Install the agent on a laptop when you want to watch its connections even while it is off the VPN: for example a manager's or administrator's laptop, a developer's machine with access to production, or a laptop that uses split tunnelling. Each laptop with the agent counts as one device, so decide by risk rather than by headcount. The agent runs on Linux and macOS; on macOS it works in a basic mode without packet capture. For every laptop, agent or not, keep endpoint protection, updates and disk encryption, because no network sensor sees what happens inside the device.

FAQ: [Remote work and exposed services](https://netsenx.com/en/faq/remote) · https://netsenx.com/en/faq/do-home-office-laptops-need-the-netsenx-agent

## Read next

- https://netsenx.com/en/is-someone-inside-your-network
- https://netsenx.com/en/encrypted-traffic-analysis

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