VPN issue and solution

As I am allowed to work from home twice a week, I needed the ability to connect via Cisco AnyConnect VPN. I was told that under Linux I should use the free OpenConnect software, as work colleagues do.
Try as I might I could not get access to some work servers. That traffic was being routed over my non-VPN connection. Why was only some of the traffic doing this? I'm no networking guru but I managed to fix it quite simply.
On a PC that could access all of the servers, I simply pinged the problem servers like:
$ ping google.com
This returned the following information:
PING google.com (74.125.237.104) 56(84) bytes of data.
Then I opened the hosts file as root:
$ sudo gedit /etc/hosts
and added the IP number followed by the URL:
74.125.237.104  google.com
Finally save and close the file and hey presto, problem solved.