What Is a VPN? Work VPN vs Personal VPN

“VPN” gets used for two genuinely different things, and it’s easy to assume they’re the same because they share a name. They’re not — they solve different problems, and one doesn’t substitute for the other.

What a VPN actually does, at a high level

Any VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and another point on the internet. What makes the two types different is what’s at the other end of that tunnel, and why you’d want the tunnel in the first place.

The office VPN

The office VPN connects your laptop to your own company’s internal network — the same one you’d be on if you plugged in at your desk — with Faraday IT managing the technology behind it. The point of it is access: reaching internal file shares, line-of-business apps, and other systems that simply aren’t reachable from the open internet at all, VPN or not.

• It’s set up by, and tied to, your company account.
• It’s what lets you work from home or while travelling as if you were in the office.
• See Connecting to the Office VPN or Connecting via the Windows Built-in VPN, depending on which type your laptop uses.

Personal VPN apps (NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and similar)

Consumer VPN apps solve a completely different problem: privacy on the open internet. When you connect through one, your traffic is routed through the VPN provider’s server, which hides your IP address and location from the websites you visit, and hides what you’re browsing from your internet provider or anyone else on the same network (useful on public Wi-Fi, for instance).

What a personal VPN doesn’t do is give you access to anything on your company’s internal network — there’s no connection between “hides your browsing from your ISP” and “lets you reach an internal file share,” because the VPN provider’s server has no relationship to your company’s network at all.

Note

This is the core distinction: the office VPN is about reaching somewhere specific (the company network). A personal VPN is about being harder to track while browsing generally. Neither one does the other’s job.

Why you can’t use one instead of the other

• A personal VPN won’t get you into internal systems. It routes you to the wider internet privately — your company’s internal network still isn’t on the other end of it.
• The office VPN isn’t designed for general browsing privacy. It’s scoped to give you access to internal resources, not to anonymise everything else you do online.

Using a personal VPN on a company laptop

If you use a personal VPN app for your own browsing, check with support before running it on a company laptop — it can occasionally conflict with the office VPN or other security tooling if both try to run at the same time. It’s generally fine on a personal device, just worth a quick check before installing it on a managed one.

A quick way to remember the difference

If the question is “how do I reach something inside the company network from home?” — that’s the office VPN. If the question is “how do I stop my browsing being tracked on this hotel Wi-Fi?” — that’s what a personal VPN is for. They’re not two ways of doing the same thing; they’re answers to two different questions.