Virtual Private Networks

The world has changed a lot in the last couple of decades. Instead of simply dealing with just one location, or regional concerns, many businesses now have to think about telecommuting, outsourcing and the logistics of running a business with distance between staff, management and suppliers or partners.

What is a Virtual Private Network?
It is a way to maintain fast, secure and reliable communications wherever their offices or employees are. Until fairly recently, this has meant the use of leased lines to maintain a wide area network (WAN). Leased lines, ranging from ISDN (integrated services digital network, 128 Kbps) to OC3 (Optical Carrier-3, 155 Mbps) fiber, provided a company with a way to expand its private network beyond its immediate geographic area. A WAN had obvious advantages over a public network like the Internet when it came to reliability, performance and security. But maintaining a WAN, particularly when using leased lines, can become quite expensive and often rises in cost as the distance between the offices increases.

VPN
As the popularity of the Internet grew, businesses turned to it as a means of extending their own networks. First came intranets, which are password-protected sites designed for use only by company employees. Now, many companies are creating their own VPN (virtual private network) to accommodate the needs of remote employees and distant offices. Virtual Private Network, or VPN. A VPN creates a digital “tunnel” between your backyard laptop and your office. It’s essentially a special piece of software that’s used to log on to the office network. But the tunnel is fortified with better encryption than WEP — so much better, that most experts think it’s nearly foolproof.

VPNs typically are IP-based networks (usually the public Internet) that use encryption and tunneling to achieve one or more of the following goals:connect users securely their own corporate network (remote access)
link branch offices to an enterprise network (intranet) extend organizations' existing computing infrastructure to include partners, suppliers and customers (extranet). The idea is to extend trust relationships across an economical public network without sacrificing security. Ideally, a VPN should behave similarly to a private network; it should be secure, highly available and have predictable performance.

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