Introduction to VPN

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it provides the encrypted and secure communication tunnel between two or more computers through the internet.  Virtual private network provides the same communication capabilities to the home and office networks securely and at very low cost. It provides the employees to office, office to office and office to business communication. VPN uses security procedures, tunneling protocols and other authentication methods to ensure that only authorized users can access the network.

Virtual Private network connections require the high speed internet connectivity and the combination of the PPTP and L2TP and IPsec to connect the remote clients securely.  Because of the growing business needs and as alternative communication methods, many businesses are using VPN and allowing their employees to connect to their servers from homes. 

VPN connections can link the small offices, enterprise offices and the mobile workers.  VPN provides the large scale shared communication infrastructure and it has provided the secure information exchange infrastructure for the suppliers, customers and branch offices at the reduced communication costs. Virtual Private networks are flexible, scalable and easy to implement at home, office and corporate level.

VPN Security Mechanism

VPN uses different security mechanisms to provide the secure communications between the client and the server computer. Implementing the following techniques can provide the secure communication over the unsecured networks.

PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol)
L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling protocol)
IPSEC (IP Security)
SSL  (Secure Socket Layer)
MPVPN (Multipath Virtual Private Network)

Advantages of VPN

VPN provides a lot of benefits to the small and enterprise businesses.  Some of the common advantages of the VPN are the following.

• Encrypt all data from Client to VPN server
• Cost Saving
• Scalability
• Simplified Management
• Easy to use
• Compress Data

Disadvantages of VPN

• VPN Provides less bandwidth than the dedicated line.
• VPN technologies and hardware from different vendors may have computability issues.
• VPN connection has to be setup in advance.
• Encryption slows down the connection speed.
• It requires the detailed understanding of the security technologies and the security related issues.
• There is no single encryption and security standard for the VPN connections.