As a small business owner, ensuring the safety and security of your business is of paramount importance.
Obviously, there are many security related technologies that you can use, but one of the best out there is known as a “Virtual Private Network.”
Essentially, this is to make sure that when your workers remotely connect to your IT infrastructure, this line of communications actually remains invisible to the outside world.
When using a “Virtual Private Network” (or VPN), any communications that are sent back and forth between your remote worker and your corporate server cannot be seen by anyone – not even a cyber attacker.
This is why using a Virtual Private Network is one of the best ways to fortify your lines of defense.
In this post, we’ll examine the mechanics as to how this line of communication is made invisible – through something that is known as “IP Tunneling.”
An Introduction to IP Tunneling
In order to fully establish the invisible connection between your remote worker’s laptop and your corporate server, a specialized route known as a “Virtual Private Network Tunnel”, or “IP Tunnel” must be established.
Here are the steps as to how this is accomplished:
1. The VPN client that is installed on your worker’s laptop will first penetrate a firewall that you have deployed at your place of business.
2. The firewall will then allocate a brand-new IP address from the VPN. This particular technique creates something called a “virtual tunnel” (alternatively, the IP Tunnel). This is how the encrypted data packet can be transmitted from your remote worker’s laptop up to the point of the firewall.
3. Now, when your worker’s laptop attempts to communicate with your corporate server, the encrypted data packets (from the last step) that have reached the firewall will then be further encapsulated by yet another layer of data packet encryption. These data packets have been created and allocated by the VPN.
These data packets will then be transmitted to the corporate server, thus establishing the full line of secure communications from your worker’s laptop.
As a result, your worker will then be able to access the resources that they need from the corporate server in a secure and “invisible” fashion.
This extra layer of protection that is afforded by the VPN is very well encrypted. So well, that even if a cyber attacker were to intercept these particular data packets, there is nothing that they can do to extract the information and the data that resides in them.
As one can see, the beauty of the Virtual Private Network is that to an outsider (i.e. cyber attacker) the secure communications via a VPN will look like ordinary traffic (or data packets).
It looks and appears as if the secure communications of the data packets from your remote worker’s laptop to the corporate server is actually transpiring over a public network segment.
However, in reality, this line of communications takes place across a hidden and secret communications paths that nobody else can access.
VPNs Are Essential To Your Business for Remote Workers
As you can see, VPNs play an essential part for your business when it comes to remote workers. Having encrypted communication between headquarters and remote workers can reduce risks of data breaches.
On another note, it’s important to keep in mind that many remote workers may actually use their smartphone to access your corporate server. With that, another item to keep in mind is “Mobile VPN.”
Stay tuned for an upcoming post regarding “Mobile VPN.”
