Picture this: your business is expanding fast. Your offices are widespread and your employees are more mobile than ever before, but the current communications structure is under strain. The business is loosing money and potential customers to time wasted in travelling and waiting. Your staffs need to access the company's servers from home in the weekends. The need for a better communications infrastructure is imminent: your spreading business has to stay connected. But you're not a cash rich multinational (yet); the budget doesn't allow the company to start laying its own fibre optic network. Dedicated leased lines or frame-relay circuits, do not provide the flexibility required for quickly creating new partner links or supporting project teams in the field. And the Internet is just too insecure and unreliable for your valuable data. You need an answer, fast.

The Solution

The answer is a Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs using the Internet have the potential to solve many of these business-networking problems. VPNs allow network managers to connect remote branch offices and project teams to the main corporate network economically and provide remote access to employees while reducing the in-house requirements for equipment and support. A VPN is a private data network that makes use of the public telecommunication infrastructure, maintaining privacy through the use of a tunnelling protocol and security procedures. The idea of the VPN is to give the company the same capabilities at much lower cost than owned or leased lines by using the shared public infrastructure rather than a private one.

But is it secure?

Using a virtual private network involves encrypting data before sending it through the public network and decrypting it at the receiving end. The end points of a VPN tunnel are the user at the client end and a server/ gateway at the central site. An additional level of security involves encrypting not only the data but also the originating and receiving network addresses. Microsoft, 3Com, and several other companies have developed the Point-to-Point Tunnelling Protocol and Microsoft has extended Windows NT to support it. VPN software is typically installed as part of a company's firewall server.

How much does it cost?

There are many issues involved in implementing a VPN; these include authentication, access control, confidentiality, and data integrity. As mentioned earlier, a VPN will be much cheaper then leased lines in the long run. A rough estimate of implementation costs can be grouped into two types: basic costs and additional costs. Basic costs include an annual fee for the VPN subscription service, license fee for the softwares, a service fee (if outsourced), and costs of additional software and hardware upgrade, if the company is upgrading from an older form of network. Additional costs include personnel/professional fees for initial deployment, annual maintenance costs and opportunity costs for downtime, planned or unplanned.

What are my options?

This website will attempt to answer that question. There are written reviews on ten selected websites important to the topic of VPNs that should save you time from searching for relevant websites and reading through them. I have also provided links to other VPN resources and news regarding the IT industry. On the right hand side of the screen you will see a yellow menu bar. Click on the words 'ten key resources' and you will be taken to a page listing ten reviews of websites. Read to find out more about what that website offers.