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firewall | VPN |
antivirus | ids | antispam
The advent of the VPN has dramatically cut the costs of supporting
roaming users and geographically dispersed offices. Before VPN's
companies used expensive leased lines between offices and banks of modems
tied to a remote access server. This was not only slow, it was less
secure and much more expensive. Today, everyone has a high-speed
Internet connection in their home and a VPN can leverage this fact to
save both time and money.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) utilizes a public network - such as the Internet - to make a secure,
encrypted network. It is typically categorized into two main areas - site-to-site and client.
A site-to-site VPN typically connects two different sites securely together as if they were
on the same network. It does this with a set of rules and protocols where one site trusts
the other and vice versa. Once this trust is established, the two sites encrypt/decrypt
all data passing between the two seamlessly to the user. This VPN is also called a nailed
VPN because it is always "on". A site-to-site VPN may include multiple sites that all
trust a central site (spoke and hub) or multiple sites that trust a central site and
some of the other sites (meshed) or multiple sites that all trust each other (fully-meshed).
Each installation is different and must be configured with a high regard to security best
practices.
A client VPN is different from a site-to-site VPN in that it is turned off and on by the client.
A common use of a client VPN is allowing a remote user to connect securely from his/her house and
access the corporate network. The next time, that same user may need to bring their laptop on a trip
and need to connect from a hotel room. With a client VPN properly configured,
this is no problem.
We have planed and deployed countless VPN solutions across many different vendors platforms.
We invite you to browse through our Case Studies and see some of
our successful VPN implementations.
The following is a partial list of some successful VPN solutions:
- Setup of a turn-key site-to-site global VPN solution
- Plan/deploy a global client-VPN solution
- Installation of a site-to-site VPN for a small company
- Setup of VPN failover using Cisco routers
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