I have no way of getting through the remote firewall

That is a network issue that you will have to work out with your network admin, or if that is you, figure out on your router. That, however, is out of this forum's scope.

What do you think?

Well, I don't know. If that accomplishes your goal, then that is the way to go. And don't limit yourself to Perl. Sometimes, cron can be a better and more reliable alternative, plus it is built in to your OS. On Windoze, you would use the task scheduler or what have you.
On an unrelated side note: Windoze is terrible for programming anything useful on.