Please provide reply to Discussion 3

Note:Please provide reply to below discussion in 150 words.

Professor Note:”You need to demonstrate to me that you read his or her post and that your response relates to their post and not yours.”Please take care of this note.

sruthi—VPN: Virtual Private Networks are the private networks used by the employees or the users to connect remotely to the network or the sites of an organization. VPNs are usually based on Internet connectivity. VPN uses virtual connections through the internet from the private network to assist and allow to connect from remote locations. A VPN maintains the privacy of the data and follow the protocols.

Benefits: We have two types of VPN available. Site-to-site VPN allows internal multiple offices or teams to connect to each other at the fixed location. Remote access VPN allows users to connect to the network of the business of a company from anywhere or remote location securely. The main benefit of deploying the VPN is it secures the sensitive data. It keeps all the malicious websites at bay and prevents from exposing the important data of the company. An employee can access from anywhere in the world by having a secure connection which is provided by VPNs. The VPNs are affordable, and the cost is considerably low. Every company should have VPNs.

Limitations: If at all the internet connectivity is lost, the VPN is lost too. VPN is solely based on internet connectivity. Installation and management of VPN on the client-side is a big expenditure. Sometimes, the VPN can be hacked too and might end up revealing the important information. The connection might become slow sometimes. The data transfer or connecting to someone else’s system might get things slower than usual. Some devices don’t have VPN supporting operating systems and have to manually configure the VPN connection. Free VPNs are always risky. They have security issues.

For example, I work from home every once in a while. I connect to my company’s applications or software only after I connect to the VPN. That helps me to easily access all the applications of the company without any disturbance. VPN might get slow due to my internet connectivity issues since the VPN is primarily based on internet connectivity. The offshore-team in the IT companies connect and access the applications through VPN. It has been an important factor every company should take care of.

Soumya–

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) has become a requirement for companies to protect their data from Internet. VPN doesn’t make a private network, it just hides your identity and make your communications more secure. VPN keeps your identity secure through encryption. With help of Virtual Private Network one can avoid content restrictions and government monitoring. A Virtual Private Network is mostly used to create a private network over public connections.

There are some other options for securing identity and sensitive information like proxy servers and TOR. Proxy servers are not totally secure, but they are available for free. Another popular option is TOR, a browser that encrypts and bounces the communication over other TOR users. A Virtual Private Network is like a middle man between you and internet. For Instance, if there is an emergency issue over a network and employee who must fix the issue is out of station, then he can connect to network remotely through VPN. There are some organizations which give limited access.

Virtual Private Network is available in different types. Each type of VPN offers differ in their scope and level of security. VPN’s can also use different protocols. Let’s look at different types of VPN that are available for internet users.

PPTP is Point to point tunnel protocol is the most commonly used and have been around long time since Windows 95. PPTP is easy to setup but is vulnerable to third parties and hackers. SSTP is Secure Socket Tunnel Protocol, it uses SSL is more advanced and safer than PPTP. SSTP can also be configured to use AES encryption. IPSec/L2TP is Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol doesn’t encrypt but create a tunnel and IPSec handles encryption. This encryption is most effective but impacts the network performance as traffic has to be converted to L2TP with encryption. Open VPN is the safest option and easily configurable on web. Open VPN uses open-source technology and protocols like SSLv3/TLSv1.IKEv2 is Internet Key Exchange is a request/response protocol. IKEv2 uses X509 certificates and a shared key.

Let us discuss some of the advantages of VPN’s

High end encryption keeps the data secure when browsing over a VPN connection.

Geographical freedom, disguising the actual location of user and use can access secure information sitting at home or anywhere in the world.

Sharing critical file over VPN makes them more secure and keep the integrity of the files.

Securing browsing over a public network to secure personal and business information.

There are some limitations to VPN’s listed below

Efficient encryption also comes with network lag.

Encryption requires a lot processing power, to achieve optimal network speed one must pay for a decent VPN service.

To ensure adequate protection of the network, one need to understand network security issues and understand configuration.

Slow VPN is always a problem to determine which server provides optimal speeds required one must try multiple servers.

VPN technology standards and products from different vendors use different equipment, this can lead to technological incompatibilities.