I’ve been freelancing and traveling for the past two years. Recently, I landed a full-time position as a bid researcher with a private healthcare company. During the interview, I made it clear that I love to travel, and have kept on stressing that.

So, the company gave me a Dell laptop with a VPN for accessing their intranet. But the VPN is mostly unused. It’s there for things like booking travel, hotels, and checking out courses on the learning hub. Anything else, like my email and workspaces(hubble) , doesn’t need it.

Now, I found out that the company VPN is often disconnected. Talking to a senior coworker, it turns out lots of people don’t bother to connect to it. The only issue they had was when they didn’t connect for a whole year, and their laptop missed updates. I’m not planning to pull a disappearing act like that.

Here’s my question: Do I really need to bother with downloading a VPN or getting a Mango Mini Router when the company VPN is hardly ever on? I’ve got a company phone too, rarely used, but I can connect to a VPN on that if needed.

Oh, and my contract doesn’t tie me down to working only in the UK. It just talks about the likelihood of me being required to attend site visits. This would be every 3-4 months and would give me the opportunity to connect to the vpn and update the laptop.

The company uses Ivanti, so if anyone is familiar with that, I’m all ears.