The last large corpo I worked for, their laptops would not connect to anything other than intranet unless the VPN application was running first.
More and more of our clients are using VDIs (cloud based VM desktops) to which you connect to with complex 2FA.
I know my partner only uses hotspots when travelling.
Back before HTTPS everywhere I considered setting up an Upside-down-ternet on an open WiFi. Never got around to it though.
With the industry standard being a split VPN with anything corporate/intranet going over the tunnel, I’m amazed that this is still an issue in 2026.
My old cellular device wouldn’t allow me to connect to any company resources unless I had the VPN going period, it didn’t matter what network I was on and if it detected anything weird or wrong in the entire process it just never connected.
