I’ve heard of people doing that but I can’t understand how they can because my work would have an absolute fit if I took the laptop out of the country. I connect to the service through a VPN so I really can’t see what their problem is and the country I live in and the company I work for and even in the same country already.
I don’t understand your last point so this applies generally to employees working abroad:
Many companies use geofencing on their VPN to reduce brute force attacks. If a single employee works from country X they have to put that country on the allow list, increasing spam and attack surface.
There is also the major concern of security of the laptop itself. Police/border control might force you to unlock the laptop. You are basically adding nation state industrial espionage to the threat model. It could also just get stolen. Or you connect to insecure network infrastructure …
All this is a concern in your home country as well but most companies are aware of the risks in their own country and want to avoid adding the (unknown) risks of a second country.
It depends a lot on what you do and how chill your employer is. This one was an IT outsourcing company and I was taking support calls from multiple other companies. Officially calls were routed to an office with a call centre, and that’s what clients were shown, but most of us preferred to WFH. The clients obviously knew it’s outsourcing but sometimes their employees didn’t. Sometimes I had to make them think they were calling ABC Inc’s tech department. So the only “rule” was not to openly talk about it. We could be in “another building” but still be working for their employer. Just don’t say that the “other building” is your summer house. Being in IT with that outsourcing company have let me get away with a lot of things that normally wouldn’t be allowed if I would have been an employee of their clients.
I’ve heard of people doing that but I can’t understand how they can because my work would have an absolute fit if I took the laptop out of the country. I connect to the service through a VPN so I really can’t see what their problem is and the country I live in and the company I work for and even in the same country already.
I don’t understand your last point so this applies generally to employees working abroad:
Many companies use geofencing on their VPN to reduce brute force attacks. If a single employee works from country X they have to put that country on the allow list, increasing spam and attack surface.
There is also the major concern of security of the laptop itself. Police/border control might force you to unlock the laptop. You are basically adding nation state industrial espionage to the threat model. It could also just get stolen. Or you connect to insecure network infrastructure …
All this is a concern in your home country as well but most companies are aware of the risks in their own country and want to avoid adding the (unknown) risks of a second country.
Besides that, there are tax implications at least for the States.
It depends a lot on what you do and how chill your employer is. This one was an IT outsourcing company and I was taking support calls from multiple other companies. Officially calls were routed to an office with a call centre, and that’s what clients were shown, but most of us preferred to WFH. The clients obviously knew it’s outsourcing but sometimes their employees didn’t. Sometimes I had to make them think they were calling ABC Inc’s tech department. So the only “rule” was not to openly talk about it. We could be in “another building” but still be working for their employer. Just don’t say that the “other building” is your summer house. Being in IT with that outsourcing company have let me get away with a lot of things that normally wouldn’t be allowed if I would have been an employee of their clients.