The office of the not-too-distant future won't be a government cubicle with moveable walls. And the only alternative won't be a home office or a drop-in site set up by an employer.

For government and industry workers, the office of the future will be wherever they want or need it to be. With handheld computers, wireless networks, Web conferencing and encrypted virtual private networks, an office can already be almost anywhere.

"My office is right on my hip," said Jeffrey Pon, deputy director of e-government initiatives at the Office of Personnel Management, pointing to his Research in Motion BlackBerry.

"The office for many people is still primarily the work space, but the list of other work areas keeps growing," said Gil Gordon, a New Jersey-based consultant on telework and alternative work spaces.

Some occupations are well-suited for a virtual office, such as health and meat inspectors, tax monitors and census enumerators. But for many federal workers, a virtual office is not yet a viable option, said Eric Reichert, vice president of Sun Microsystems' iWork Solutions group. But he added that virtual offices are inevitable.

Before employees work off a local network, federal managers need assurance that their hub will be protected. Security devices allow them to monitor network activity, no matter where users may be, Reichert said. Several vendors sell technology for managing virtual office security

Virtual offices will be part of the future workplace for several reasons, said Chris Michael, a technology strategist at Computer Associates. "The most obvious one is that you don't have to have a cube in an office building somewhere."

But virtual offices also raise some difficult questions, particularly about security, he said. "We don't want to turn our professional workers into little [information technology] departments," Michael added. "It's not their job, not their strength. Those things need to happen behind the scenes for them, such as automatic delivery of software patches and updates."

The Census Bureau is one of the federal agencies leading the virtual office trend. For the 2010 census, bureau officials plan to deploy 500,000 to 600,000 workers equipped with handheld computers to go door to door counting people who do not respond by mail.

In addition to collecting data, Census officials hope to verify the quality of data by using handheld computers with automated mapping capabilities, said Arnold Jackson, assistant director of the decennial census.

Workers in the field could transmit encrypted data by modem or a wireless connection to a central location, and they would never need to be inside a government office unless a problem arises. "There are a lot of benefits," Jackson said, "including mobility, speed, the time to get to the house, the freshness of the data."