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With more and more offices practicing the remote job and hiring the employees from abroad, the concerns about the safety of the Internet connection appear. Some countries provide limited access to certain services, public Wi-Fi is no longer a safe option, and there are some other complications and risks. If you are a business owner and you decided to organize a remote office, then the first thing you need to think about is your VPN service.
You may be wondering why you should invest in something that is already present on the market (and there is a huge variety of various available VPN services). The answer is because your VPN service will be more fast, reliable and you will have more control over it.
If you want to protect your traffic and business from malicious hackers or providers, if you need access to numerous services blocked by your country, and if you care about your data safety, then public VPN is not for you. Any business nowadays needs to develop its VPN to allow employees access important corporate data while traveling, being on a business trip, or working from home. Each year more and more companies worldwide invest in VPN making its market to grow significantly. For example, Statista claims that last year the size of the VPN market reached $23,6 billion and by the end of 2021 it will be over $31,1.
One more interesting fact is that in the last two months the VPN usage in all countries all over the world has increased enormously. E.g. in the USA the usage of virtual private networks per week increased up to 124%. This trend was provoked by the pandemic and it will stay even after the quarantine is over. Many businesses reconsidered their approach during these two months and chances are that many people will keep working from their homes on a regular basis. That is why a secure connection is a must!
Key advantages of VPN for your company
So basically any VPN service creates a tunnel to transfer and receive the data which is going to be encrypted. All your Internet activity will be performed through that VPN tunnel instead of the provider’s main channel, and therefore you will be using the Internet from the VPN server and not from your machine or device. So your network activity will seem like one single connection to a single IP address, and it gets harder to interfere with that connection and extract any info it transmits.
So VPN connection is much safer and it can protect your data from malicious users. Moreover, it is extremely hard to hack a highly protected VPN server, which makes it a perfect choice for business. Here are some more advantages your VPN service for business can offer:
Still wondering whether your business needs its VPN Then check out the following list of reasons why it might (if at least a couple of the named reasons are present in your company, then VPN is a must for you):
- Your employees browse a lot. Browsings can lead to sensitive data disclosure and your employees may not even know that they are risking their security (passwords, business details, etc.) while visiting HTTP websites.
- You organize business trips. If you have partners from abroad, provide consulting services on place or simply travel to close the deals in person, then you’ll need to access some corporate data from your device. Chances are that you will either end up using public Wi-Fi or connecting to some unreliable but available provider. This implies a lot of risks related to data security and protection.
- You support the BYOD approach. BYOD means “bring your own device” policy which is very popular in many companies. It is very convenient and cost effective because the company does not need to invest in a lot of gadgets and their support. However, BYOD puts your business into a risky position because you cannot control what networks your employees connect to.
- You hire specialists from abroad. To expand your staff hiring specialists from other countries is a good practice helping to turn business to a whole new level. However, you should not forget that you are sharing the data related to your company activities over the Internet and it is almost impossible to monitor the online activity of your employees abroad.
Why are existing VPNs not good enough for business purposes?
You’ve probably heard a lot about numerous commercial VPNs that provide you with access to their services for a certain payment (usually they require monthly subscription paid for each user). Among well-known companies who do this, you’ll see Cyberghost, Nord VPN, Express VPN, and many more. So you may be wondering why you should create your VPN for business if you can pay a reasonable price and use services with no fuss.
To begin with, all public VPN services are a potential danger to your company’s security. Your data can become too vulnerable if you consider transmitting it using any of the available well-known VPNs because the companies which own them can see all your traffic. Everything starting with websites you and your coworkers visit and ending with the information you all transfer can be seen. Of course, those companies state that they do not keep clients logs, however, there is no way to check if this is true. Moreover, some public VPNs were initially created to steal your data and this is a serious concern you should take into account. Yes, it is cheaper to buy a subscription and do not waste your time on setting everything up, but rather questionable security of your data is the additional price you are paying.
On top of that, the quality of public VPN services is rather poor. You can experience issues with the speed of connection, longer pings when you need to reach the server. Why is that? Simply because public servers host a lot of users (hundreds or thousands even). So you can choose even the most expensive server and end up having all the mentioned challenges anyway.
How to set up your own VPN?
First of all, you need to decide on what country your VPN server will be located. It is better to choose the locations that are situated not too far from your own. This will allow you to achieve the faster speed of connection, secure your traffic flow, ensure channel stability, and improve pings. The next crucial criteria is Internet availability and the number of blocked services. The fewer restrictions your preferred server location has – the better.
The next step is to choose the right hosting for your VPN service. You will need to rent a virtual server from any of the existing hosting providers. The most popular ones are Amazon WS, DigitalOcean, Bluehost, Vultr, and others. Then you select a necessary protocol of VPN connection, use certain scripts and ready-made solutions to create your VPN server for a certain platform.
You will need to configure a lot of things manually, create server certificates, generate keys and pairs, and make encryption files. Configuring a VPN requires a lot of commands, some manual ports, and protocols adjustments, creating client’s infrastructures and installing configurations. On top of that, you will have to test your VPN connection. In the future, you may even need to revoke client’s certificates to prevent people who, for example, leave your company from accessing your corporate VPN and data.
This whole procedure seems like a real headache. So you may require the assistance of real professionals to set up your VPN for business and make it function smoothly. Or as an option, you may take a look at a solution like Outline VPN or even develop your alike solution and make income from selling VPN to corporations.
Outline VPN is a reliable SaaS offering high-quality services which even became a partner of a giant hosting company DigitalOcean that provides cloud servers. These platforms allow you to create a server using their internal manager and share access to it with the users you need. So basically you can set up your VPN effortlessly and operate your server keeping your web traffic under total control. Companies who use services like Outline can control the security of their data, the number of people who are allowed to use the VPN and access certain kinds of information.
FAQ
To sum it up
Total digitalization and remote work tendency dictate new rules to the business world. If you do not take good care of your corporate and sensitive data you may end up providing easy access to it. So VPN is a go-to solution able to protect your business from crucial information loss. Any company that hires professionals from abroad, allows employees to work from home or arranges business trips needs to set up its VPN and use it actively.
