Think Work, Think VPN

We are encouraging everyone who works remotely to immediately start up a VPN connection (to our VPN of course!) whenever they start working remotely. This is for a variety of reasons, but includes :-

  1. Any on site services that you might need for working are being made available only via the VPN. This includes some on site services that were previously more widely available.
  2. Any site where you might connect to Google service and/or UoP services may be compromised and your traffic would be visible to hackers. Using the VPN means all traffic is encrypted – a hacker will see that you are connecting to a UoP VPN but that is all. Without a VPN, any amount of additional information may be leaked – perhaps WordPress credentials to an official UoP blog site!
  3. By using the UoP VPN, all your traffic goes via our firewall which gives you an additional level of protection against malware that you are unlikely to find on the average cybercafe’s firewall (if they have one at all).

Apart from all those reasons, it is also sensible from a practicable point of view – if you immediately bring up the VPN when working, you won’t be slowed down when you need to use the VPN. Rather than trying to use an internal service, wait for an error to occur, and then remember that you need to use the VPN, it will just work.

The “Work Anywhere” articles for Personal Devices and UoP Laptops will give you directions to the relevant article on setting up the VPN.

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