The concept of working from home (WFH) isn’t something that only came along relatively recently with the Covid-19 pandemic. Boomers have been WFH for years – but with most jobs and companies, it used to be a rare treat – either to help someone who was suffering from illness or perhaps an employee’s family member needed support. Furthermore, without the technology we have now, depending on the job, WFH often meant taking carloads of books, a typewriter, and A4 paper files onto your kitchen table.
Nowadays, many white-collar jobs, especially those in the creative industries (copywriting being a case in point) can be performed from any simple computer with an internet connection. As a result, many people under the age of, say, 30, might well expect to WFH at least one or two days per week as part of their remuneration package. Lots of folks are more productive when WFH than in an office, especially if they have the sort of work that is best performed without distractions. After all, you don’t have to put up with your colleagues’ smelly instant noodles or suffer them nattering away about what they bought in M&S on their lunch break while you’re trying to think up a snappy headline for your latest marketing email. That said, if you’re single, working from an office gives much more scope for romance, and those Friday afternoon drinks with colleagues can sometimes turn quite exciting…
But whether you’re working ‘hybrid’ (splitting your contracted hours between home and office), full time in the office, or permanently ensconced in your man/woman cave – one thing remains constant: the technology you use for work and leisure needs to stay safe from online baddies such as hackers and phishing criminals.
The first line of defence for the home / office worker is to connect to the internet via a VPN server. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) simply places a third-party encrypted ‘middleman’ server between the VPN user’s device and the wider internet. If WFH and using your regular domestic internet service provider (ISP) – the VPN server prevents your ISP from identifying who you are or where you’re located. This makes VPNs especially good for people who WFH on company-supplied laptops, which might well contain commercially confidential or highly personal data.
Additionally, the encrypted location cloaking facility afforded by a VPN also offers other advantages. Let’s take a quick look:
Easing off the throttle
If you’re WFH on a project that needs lots of data transfer; maybe you’re using automated marketing software or perhaps a games designer. Then you might well inadvertently transgress your ISP’s ‘fair usage’ policy. In that case, your ISP might well ‘throttle’ your connection – slowing it down to an unusable crawl – until the next monthly billing interval. But if you were using a VPN, the ISP can’t know who the data-gobbler is, nor where they might be located, so they can’t throttle the connection.
Home and away
If you’re on holiday, say, in Spain, but your normal residence is the UK, you might want to catch up on BBC iPlayer’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. If you log onto the internet directly via your Spanish hotel’s Wi-Fi, the iPlayer platform will block your access because they can’t be sure you are a UK resident BBC license payer. However, if you use the VPN client on your laptop, you can choose a London-based VPN server and be connected to The Beeb within seconds.
Paying through the nose
Don’t worry, we’re not talking about purchasing Peruvian powder here! Instead, did you know about saving money on online purchases using a VPN’s encryption to avoid the concept of dynamic pricing? Let’s imagine you’re planning that Spanish holiday. You’re a well-paid merchant banker and you want to use an accommodation portal to book a villa in Majorca for you and three other couples over the forthcoming summer. The AI analytics software on the website first looks at your internet protocol (IP) address – it sees that you’re logging on to the site from a building in Canary Wharf and that you’re using the latest MacBook Pro. Immediately, the AI marks you as being relatively wealthy, for obvious reasons.
But if you had a VPN on that MacBook, you could choose a server based in, say, a location somewhere in Morocco or N Africa. The device you’re using wouldn’t show up through the VPN’s security shields, and the website’s AI has you placed in a less affluent area than Central London, so the price for the villa miraculously comes down.
Keeping under the radar
There are other advantages to using VPN servers at work or during leisure activities – avoidance of your activity monitoring by your ISP or perhaps more shadowy agencies, especially if you’re a political activist or ardent trade unionist. If you use online dating apps, then a VPN browser extension might just stop your device or account from being hacked by catfishing fraudsters. Then there is the disconnection of insecure Wi-Fi hotspots – if you inadvertently log on to an insecure hacker’s created hotspot – a VPN client will detect the anomaly and disconnect your device before any viruses can be installed on your machine.
So whether you’re working, on holiday, running a small business, or just gaming at home with your feet up – it makes perfect sense to install a VPN onto any internet-connected device you might use. It just might save your job and a lot of hassle.
