A VPN is a great start, but there’s a few things you can do to make yourself a bit safer.
I like Mullvad for it’s client that allows me be in a lockdown mode where access to the internet can only go through a VPN. It’s a killswitch and you’re going to want one no matter who provides your VPN. The reason you want a kill switch is because your computer may otherwise connect to your home or office network and leak your IP address.
If you torrent you’ll want a torrent client like qBitTorrent because under advanced settings in that program you can set it to only work on your VPN’s network interface. This adds a second wall of protection to make sure you don’t leak your IP address.
At this point your ISP isn’t going to know any much more than you’re using a VPN and torrenting, but that’s all. And you’re probably good right here, but there’s more you can do if you’re really worried.
By tweaking some wireguard settings in the Mullvad client you can even obscure your torrenting traffic altogether. At that point your ISP won’t have much more to report than that you’re using a VPN.
You’ll then want to test your VPN is working well with your torrent client by using Torrent Tracker IP Checker or something similar. Verify that your IP is what it should be.
And if you’re feeling extra motivated, doing all of this on a separate computer running linux would be ideal so that you can ensure no software running on your rig deanonymizes you, and can keep it locked when not in use.
Those few employees are probably going to all be developers, and despite there being a bunch of mathematics and engineering involved, being a developer is very much a creative process. Similarly, I wouldn’t begrudge a digital artist for wanting to use a Mac to do their work.
If a developer is asking for a thing, they’re not asking for it because they’ve suddenly developed a nervous tic. There’s typically a reason behind it. Maybe its because they want to learn that thing to stay relevant, or explore it’s feasibility, or maybe it’s to support another project.
I used to get the old “we don’t support thing because nobody uses thing” a lot. The problem with that thinking is that unless support for whatever thing immaculates out of nowhere it’ll just never happen. And that’s a tough sell for a developer who needs to stay relevant.
I remember in like 2019 I asked for my company to host git repos on the corporate network, and I got a hard no. Same line, there wasn’t a need, nobody uses git. I was astounded. I thought my request was pretty benign and would just sail right through because by that point it was almost an industry standard to use git. I vented about it to some devs in another department and learned that they had a system with local admin attached to the corporate network that somehow IT didn’t know about. They were using that to host their repos.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if keeping employees happy is too expensive, then you gotta at least be aware of the potential costs of unhappy employees.