Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a way of establishing a secure communications
channel between two (or more) points across an otherwise insecure medium such as the
public internet.
Example Scenario
For example, consider that your email server is hosted with us and you connect
to it using standard POP3 from your office network. The chances are, your
emails will transit some 3rd party ISP networks. If your emails
are not encrypted these 3rd parties can simply "sniff" the traffic which means
they can read your emails. By employing a VPN you can ensure that all the
traffic that you send and receive between your PC (or even your entire office)
is encrypted. This means that although the traffic can still transit a 3rd
party network, anyone attempting to "sniff" the traffic won't be able to read it
or make sense of it.
How do they work?
The great thing is that VPNs are seamless; your applications and software don't
have to support or even know anything about the VPNs. This is because they
work at a lower level, and simply encrypt all of the traffic travelling between
the two locations on the fly.
Types of VPN
We support two types of VPN with our SecuraGuard™ products, these are PPTP and IPsec:
PPTP: Point to Point Tunnelling Protocol.
PPTP was developed by Microsoft and is a simple and easy method of tunnelling to
a remote network from a single PC. PPTP is easy to configure and is
supported out of the box in Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 so once
you have the SecuraGuard™ appliance setup in the datacentre protecting your
servers you can start taking advantage of communicating securely with your
servers without the need for any extra hardware or appliances in your office or
on your roaming laptops of even from your home network. The primary
disadvantage of PPTP is that it's only really designed to connect a small number
of users to your firewall protected network (max 16 users). The other
downside is that although it works well from behind a NAT (Network Address
Translation) connected network, you can currently only have a single PPTP VPN
connection connecting out. The solution to this is to look at IPsec....
IPSec stands for Internet Protocol Security
IPsec is a suite of protocols designed for a number of different uses. Amongst them is the ability to setup
semi-permanent encrypted tunnels between two locations. The advantage of
IPsec over PPTP is that it supports "site-to-site" VPN connections as shown in
the diagram above. It can be configured so that all traffic between the
two locations is encrypted on the fly without the need to set anything up on
individual workstations. The disadvantage of IPsec is that you need a
SecuraGuard™ appliance installed locally on your offices in
order to set it or (or alternatively a compatible IPsec capable router).
|
