VPN - For All Your Accessibility Needs | The Communication Blog

Monday, September 21, 2009

VPN - For All Your Accessibility Needs

By Mitch Stenson

In this hard economic time we are all going through, many people are looking for ways to be productive and efficient. A lot of companies are turning to VPN. What is VPN and how does it work?

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. Companies with multiple office locations can connect the locations via the Internet. This allows employees at all locations access to and sharing of company data.

The system is comprised of hardware and software. The hardware includes servers-both for dial up and dedicated network access. You also need a firewall.

When making transmissions it is vital that you secure them with the encryption provided with a VPN. For obvious reasons, you don't want your information to get in the wrong hands, but if it does, you don't want it to be readable.

Sender Verification is often obtained using a digital certificate, although the login/password system is very common as well. To ensure the privacy of your information, they use encryption parameters to make up the certificate or login to verify the correct user is accessing the information on the system.

You may be wondering how the information will travel on the web. VPNs use a method of tunneling to complete this task. Wrapping a group, or groups, together is called tunneling. The reason for this is it allows the IP address of the sender and receiver to remain anonymous.

Using a VPN, rather than a dedicated phone line can be very advantageous because of the price. It can also allow your employees to access their needed information while traveling or working from home. Which brings up a good point. Having the ability to work from home occasionally can not only improve productivity (more hours to work rather than commuting), but it can also raise morale.

In the end, consider the productivity that can come to a company with offices all over the country, from working with VPN. The ability to access all the same information from any of their various offices; the option to have the direct access to all inventory to minimize on shipping costs; and even the ease of running and analyzing report in real-time for the entire company. The possibilities are endless.

About the Author:

The Communication Blog
Bookmark and Share

No comments:

Post a Comment

 

The Communication Blog Copyright © 2009