Are you the type of person who worries about lost productivity when you have to stay at home to meet the cable guy, who might show up at your residence between the hours of 8 AM and 6 PM, and then arrives promptly at 7:30PM just in time for dinner? Are you frustrated by feeling like your day is "wasted" when you are not at the office, but have plenty of cycles and time to work or catch up on work? If so, VPN may be the answer. (WARNING: may cause severe headaches and nausea). Well, not really. VPN isn't a miracle medicine that allows you to bend time and space to work from home, but it is a Virtual Private Network and it can help overcome the worries of network security so that critical data can be safely transmitted between your home network and your company network.

What is a VPN?

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, utilizes an existing internet connection to create a secure "Tunnel" from point A to point B. Usually, point A is an employee's home or a remote office, and point B is a main corporate campus or a data center. The advantage of a VPN is that is uses existing network resources (the internet) to connect one or more geographically distributed locations. The VPN has enabled companies of all sizes to offer extended benefits to employees and has enabled them to operate is a distributed work force capacity where these capabilities were not previously financially feasible.

What are the advantages?

The growing popularity of using Virtual Private Networks indicates that businesses need and want a secure and inexpensive network model to connect all the stake holders in their organization. Some high level advantages include:

• Cheaper than dedicated network connections (Frame Relay, T1).
• Rapid deployment to small-and-home-office and mobile workers.
• Customizable security policies for all user types.

What are the disadvantages?

The main disadvantages of using Virtual Private Networks hover around the physical security of sensitive information once it leaves the enterprise and enters the remote location. An employee can store sensitive data on their person computer, which can then be stolen or compromised after the VPN tunnel is severed. One way around this is to use the VPN to allow a user access to their work computer via Terminal Emulation, such as Windows Remote Desktop, Unix X11 Server, or third party software such as VNC, but not allow protocols that can move the data, such as FTP and SSH. As with all network security concerns, the security policy is only as good as the personnel managing and utilizing the policy.

Who can help?

At Artis IT, we pride ourselves in our ability to find the right solution for the job. That is, try not to squeeze a square peg in a round hole. With that said, if you are currently considering a VPN implementation for your small business and you don't know where to start, we'd love the invitation to work on the project with you.