Yeah, your scenario is fairly common unfortunately. When your code has to access a database or system inside the firewall, and the security folks don't want dev

Yeah, your scenario is fairly common unfortunately. When your code has to access a database or system inside the firewall, and the security folks don't want developer's local machines to access anything inside the firewall. So they end up setting up these personal "local/development" VMs inside the firewall for development work, and these are not to be confused with the development server.