Do you earn a portion of your living through the internet? This might afford you an impressive kind of freedom. You might be able to work across borders with impressive clients, and contribute from just about any location – including your local cafe.
But there are also digital forms of risk that must be grappled with. If you’re sending data packets all day, you need to be sure that those packets are not going to be intercepted by a malicious stranger. This is where business VPN plays an essential role. Let’s take a look at how and why this might be the case.
Public Wi-Fi is convenient but notoriously unsafe
If you’re connecting from a public network, then you should be aware that you could be sharing that network with just about anyone. In many cases, the network you’re connecting to might not even belong to the cafe you’re sitting in. After all, anyone with a mobile phone can set up a hotspot and give it a deceptive name.
A VPN gets around this by encrypting all of your traffic and routing it through a remote server. Thus, client details can’t be leaked because you connected to the wrong WiFi.
Freelancers thrive on reputation
If you want to demonstrate to would-be clients and collaborators that you’re trustworthy and above board, then connecting through a VPN can demonstrate that you take confidentiality seriously, and that you don’t pose a significant risk of a leak. This can be valuable, even in non-technical roles.
For example, if you know that you’re going to be sending a highly sensitive document to a third party for editing, would you place greater trust in a candidate who connected via a VPN, or one who didn’t recognize the value of such a measure?
Region unlocking
It’s also worth considering one of the other major advantages of a good VPN – its ability to mask the region from which you’re connecting. This might allow you to access region-restricted content in one part of the world, as though you’re connecting from another. It’s worth establishing first whether your streaming platform of choice will allow you to connect via a VPN, and whether you end up sacrificing download speed in order to connect remotely.
For freelancers, there’s also a more practical upside: VPNs might allow for smoother collaboration within international groups. This might allow for smoother collaboration, and ease growth over the long term.
