How VPNs make Business Networks Safer

Normally, those on the office network usually use a common modem to ‘dial out’ to the Internet. In reality, what they do is to get in touch with the Internet Service Provider or ISP, with the binary equivalent of “I want to access www.australianvpn.com”. Or any other website for that matter. In the above instance, the ISP would then facilitate contact with the web server of www.australianvpn.com for website access.

Unfortunately, there could also be hackers watching everything that is transmitted in both directions. You could be either uploading sensitive company information or downloading it from other sites, but it is not hard at all to decode a binary transmission, which consists of ones and zeroes.

How a VPN can help

The security provided by VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, is second to none. This is how it works – a physical VPN server is placed between your office network and the internet, or specifically, after the Internet Service Provider. All website access requests are sent to the VPN server, which then forwards these requests to the respective web server(s).

Office PC ↔ Office network ↔ Internet Service Provider ↔ VPN server ↔ Internet

The advantage of a VPN is that all communications between the user(s) and the VPN server is encrypted. This way, anyone looking in sees only ‘junk’ or random characters, which he/she cannot make sense of. Decrypting 128-bit encryption would take 734 centuries on a single computer; even a million computers working together would need 26 days. It is unlikely that hackers have that kind of patience or processing power at their disposal.

Couldn’t hackers tap into intercept the data transfer between the VPN server and the web server(s)? When VPNs send/receive data from web servers, it happens through a ‘tunnel’ or VPN connection. These make use of high-security protocols to prevent anything of the sort. Different VPNs use various protocols, but all of them are inevitably secure.

Any web access request contains the IP address of the desktop PC/laptop/mobile device it originated from. The VPN server that comes in between replaces it with its own IP address, so any hacker attacks are directed towards it and not your business network or office PC.

This is how you can make a visible difference to the safety of your business network at an affordable price – there is no need for you to invest in any additional hardware, and VPN services are inexpensive. VPN service providers are able to keep their prices low by catering to multiple clients simultaneously and leveraging upon shared hardware.