My sister is planning on going to Portugal on holiday for a week. She doesn’t want to you use up her remaining holidays and would like to work whilst there. She works remotely anyway. Can her company see where she is even if she is on the work VPN?
Yea they can. They may also get an alert if someone logs in from an unexpected location, I.e. somewhere they’ve never logged in from before.
They will know and will probably ask her why she’s logging in from Portugal.
Has she just asked her company if she can work abroad for a week? My work was pretty flexible with it.
Can her company see where she is even if she is on the work VPN
Yes, and depending on where they expect incoming connections from she may not be able to log in altogether (if the IT team have their shit together).
Yes, they can track it. Whether they will notice or whether they’ll care is another question, but they might, and she could get in trouble for it if she’s doing it without permission.
She should ask her employer if it would be allowed. Some don’t mind their remote employees working from another country for short periods of time. She would no doubt be expected to actually work her normal hours, though, not just faff about checking emails occasionally in between sightseeing/binge drinking…
Could she leave her work laptop at home and connect to it with something like teamviewer with a second laptop on holidays?
That way her work computer is connecting to her work network and keeps the same IP?
Had a meeting regarding this today, best of my knowledge you can legally work abroad for 30 days before things start to become an issue for tax reasons.
If she’s working remotely anyway and willing to sign in over there, probably just easier to pass it by whoever’s above them and get approval. They’d hardly give a shit as long as she’s online.
We fired girl doing that. As IT I am getting daily network stability report, that report also includes from where connection was established.
The best way for this to work would be with a VPN enabled WiFi hotspot that will tunnel her traffic back to Ireland via the router and not directly on her laptop, but tunneling through a tunnel via her work VPN isn’t going to be the fastest or most stable
Why would she not just say she is going to Portugal but will continue to work ?
Probably best to just tell them you’re staying with a family member or friend for a week. Depending on the type of work being done your employer may not give 2 shits as long as the work hours are being completed. You’re just digging a big hole for yourself if you’re caught bullshitting.
I have taken my work laptop with me on genuine annual leave holidays abroad and then needed to get on the VPN to help with this or that.
It has never worked any differently, I connect to the local WiFi, log into my VPN, voila!
I have done this from many different countries and there has never been a single issue or unusual activity that was flagged to me.
I’m not saying all VPN setups are created equally, but that’s my experience and I work for a company for which intellectual property and security would be very highly protected.
If she’s using their VPN, they can absolutely see where she is. If she’s using her own VPN, then no.
If she wants to work from Portugal without telling them, she should get a free trial of NordVPN or something, and set it up on her laptop. Then set it to an Irish location and log into the work VPN through it.
Yes the companies system will know but realistically feck all people look into it. They would have other work to worry about. It’s like Internet history. Logged but nobody looking at it unless there is an issue. Tell her to go.
The absolute worst thing she can do is not tell them, and they find out. The job will not be happy about that.
Anyone here can give any good info/tutorial link on how to build your own vpn at home and be able to connect from other locations?
you will have a country based IP that the VPN uses (3g, local wifi, etc) whihc shows up on the VPN, work side.
There is a way but that involves some work: have a computer at home, vpn to home network from abroad and Remote Desktop into the computer. Then use this computer to do work related stuff.
So you need to have a second computer and know how to securely set it up for remote access.
Yes but it probably won’t matter to them. Cyber security consultant here.
They may have controls in place about what data can be accessed from where. But most places have a Liberal policy for Europe and allow access.
Her manager won’t know, she would have to trigger some serious data policies for them to notice it. And report her to the manager.
If they are still using a vpn it’s old technology. It would suggest to me they don’t have strong data controls.
How big is her company? If the company is large enough, they rarely actually notice, especially if it’s commonplace for the senior employees to work from multiple locations (sets a precedent that this is an allowable practice not to flag).
Not saying it’s 100% safe for your sister, but none of my friends and colleagues have ever been told off or even had mentioned when we work from abroad.