VPN Security



VPN Security

Describe the characteristics of VPNs and how they provide security.

A well-designed VPN can greatly benefit a company. For example, it can:

Extend geographic connectivity

Improve security

Reduce operational costs versus traditional WAN

Reduce transit time and transportation costs for remote users

Improve productivity

Simplify network topology

Provide global networking opportunities

Provide telecommuter support

Provide broadband networking compatibility

Provide faster ROI (return on investment) than traditional WAN

What features are needed in a well-designed VPN? It should incorporate:

Security

Reliability

Scalability

Network management

Policy management (Sidel, 2007)

In recent years, various virtual private network (VPN) technologies have been widely used to provide secure site-to-site connectivity and remote access. There are many reasons for such overwhelming adoption and business success; two major factors are total ownership cost savings and productivity enhancements. The total ownership cost can be considered as the initial deployment cost plus the cost of user training, support, and facility maintenance over time. Productivity enhancements can be measured in terms of tool effectiveness, user time savings, usability improvements, and user satisfaction.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN is an emerging technology that provides remote-access VPN capability, using the SSL function that is already built into a modern web browser. SSL VPN allows users from any Internet-enabled location to launch a web browser to establish remote-access VPN connections, thus promising productivity enhancements and improved availability, as well as further IT cost reduction for VPN client software and support (Sidel, 2007).

Explain how VPNs are commonly used in network communications and how they are implemented.

The main reason that companies use secure VPNs is so that they can transmit sensitive information over the Internet without needing to worry about who might see it. Everything that goes over a secure VPN is encrypted to such a level that even if someone captured a copy of the traffic, they could not read the traffic even if they used hundreds of millions of dollars ...