Virtual Private Network

During the last couple of decades, the world has changed a lot. One of the most prominence changes is that instead of simply dealing with local or regional concerns, many businesses now have to think about global markets and logistics. Many companies now have facilities spread out across the country or even around the world. For these kinds of companies here is one thing that all of them need, a way to maintain fast, secure and reliable communications connected to wherever their offices are.

Years ago, if a remote office needed to connect with the central computer or network at company headquarters it meant installing dedicated leased lines between the locations. These dedicated leased lines provided relatively fast and secure communications between the sites, but they were very costly. And for mobile users companies would have to set up dedicated dial-in remote access servers (RAS). It would have a modem, or many modems, and the company would have to have a phone line running to each modem. The mobile users could then connect to the network this way; however the speed was painstakingly slow and made it difficult to do much productive work.

On the other hand, nowadays with Internet and broadband connection services much of that has changed. With the World Wide Web that interconnecting computers around the globe. Why should a company spend money and create headaches by implementing dedicated leased lines and dial-in modem banks? One way to achieve this is using a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. It is a private communications network usually used within a company, or by several different companies or organizations, communicating over a public network. A VPN provide a method for an organization to have a secured local area network (LAN) over a shared or public infrastructure like the internet.

This is a sample VPN that have a main LAN at the corporate headquarters, other LANs at remote offices and employees connecting from home or on-the-go.

A VPN uses "virtual" connections routed through the Internet from the company's private network to the remote site or employee. It builds up a passage from which the encrypted data is channeled and ultimately reaches the other side and is then unencrypted by the receiver. The traffic within the VPN tunnel is encrypted so that other users of the public Internet can not readily view intercepted communications. A VPN creates a wide area network (WAN) or an extranet within the organization which eliminates the need of installing dedicated lines for the purpose of communication. This is one of the most important advantages of using the VPN technology. It gives remote access to those in need of the information like the organization's employees who are on the move. It can even connect to the partners and customers as well. Then the remote users are able to access the information form the organizations LAN anytime. It eventually leads to a huge reduction in the organization's cost structure.

This shows how a VPN packet traveling across the public network.

Even though a VPN's data travels across a public network like the Internet, it is secured because of very strong encryption. In addition, VPN monitor its traffic in very sophisticated ways that ensure packets never get altered while traveling across the public network. Encryption and data verification is very intensive in a VPN.

However not everyone need to have access to the whole organization's network, some of them may only need to access to their computers. They may want to work from home accessing documents and information from their work computer. There are two products worth considering performing this job called