VPN at Home vs. VPN at the Office

VPN gets used to mean two very different things, and the confusion leads to buying the wrong solution. Here's the distinction.

Consumer VPN (home use)

Services like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, or Mullvad route your traffic through their servers, masking your IP from websites and ISPs. They're useful for privacy on public Wi-Fi, accessing region-locked content, or preventing your ISP from selling your browsing data. They do nothing for your local network security and don't help you access your office remotely.

Business/site-to-site VPN

This is what IT departments deploy. It creates an encrypted tunnel between two networks — your home and your office, or two office locations. When connected, your machine behaves as if it's physically on the office network. You can access file shares, printers, internal applications, and anything else on that network. This requires configuration on the office router or firewall (pfSense, Cisco, Fortinet, etc.).

Remote access VPN (for remote workers)

A subset of business VPN, this is set up to allow individual employees to connect to the corporate network from home. It's the same tunnel concept, but configured for individual users rather than permanent site connections. Common implementations: OpenVPN, WireGuard, or vendor-specific clients for enterprise firewalls.

Which one do you need?

Consumer VPN: personal privacy, travel, public Wi-Fi. Business/remote access VPN: accessing company resources from outside the office. They don't overlap. Don't buy a consumer VPN service and expect it to connect you to your office.