Do you know that it takes a usual company up to six months to identify a data leak and eliminate its consequences? At that, the damage suffered by it can amount to millions, and the reputation in some cases cannot be recovered. For its prevention, it is important to know means of information protection. One of such countermeasures is the use of VPN (virtual private networks). That is particularly important under the conditions of growing level of cybercrime.
You will find here below five reasons why do you need private networks for your business.
- Protection from cybercrime
Nobody can guarantee absolute protection for working on the network. Both small companies and large corporations are regularly coming under hacker attacks. Large social networks are not an exception, where whole departments guard against an information security breaches.
Among the risks to information security are the interception of passwords and confidential data, traffic modification, hacking routers and redirecting users to malicious sites. However, any user can take measures that will greatly reduce the risk of falling of valuable data into the attackers hands. So, VPN is a secure window for safe Internet connection. In other words, being located between the user’s device and the network, such private networks provide encryption of the transferred information and serve as a “line of defense” from hackers.
There are nowadays a great number of VPN providers in the market. But not every of them can be brought into line on the issue of security. That’s why, before making a choice, you need to determine the priority aspects for your business in regard to information security. It’s also needed to know where you have your greatest vulnerabilities.
- Secure Remote Work
VPN network is needed not only for secure access to external resources, but also for local networks protection. This is especially important if some people in your team work remotely, but everyone of them uses a corporate network. In fact, if one of the employees enters it through a hacked Wi-Fi network, important documents, correspondence and other information can become available for everybody on the Internet.
Modern VPNs don’t require manual configuration and enable automatic security management. In addition, if such a need arises, they provide the opportunity, to allocate a secure IP for each member of the team.
- Ability to circumvent provider’s and website geoblock restrictions
Using VPN, you can surf the Internet from anywhere in the world and bypass site blocking regardless of your physical location. At that, you can legally track the actions of competitors without being noticed. But anyone who tries to track your online activities will only find the VPN server you are using. For this reason, it will be almost unrealistic to find your real IP address.
- Client Safety
VPN is an important tool if your business activities is related to the services sector. For example, if you work in the hotel and restaurant business and strive to secure the public Wi-Fi networks of your establishments.
If a hacker breaks into your network, he will get all the data passing through it: passwords, bank card data, etc. Using a router with VPN support will enable you to avoid this.
Try accessing the device of one of your employees to check the security of your public Wi-Fi network. It must be connected to your network. If you succeeded, you have to improve the security settings.
- VPN Availability
Creating a reliable VPN means a lot of work and financial investment. This requires equipment, bandwidth costs and high power consumption, as well as trained staff (in particular, specialists who will work on updates).
Paid vs. Free VPNs. Differences:
- Paid VPN service gives you the opportunity to get an allocated IP address (es), which belongs only to the client’s account and is not used by hundreds of other users.
- 24/7 technical support. This is a separate cost item for VPN providers, so free services don’t offer such a service.
- In most cases, paid VPNs work using OpenVPN, L2TP, SSH protocols, while public VPNs often use PPTP, which level of protection is not high enough.
- Most paid services offer anonymous payment methods for services.
Using a VPN is a sensible investment in maintaining business security. When we are talking about achievements and reputation for which you have spent years of work, saving on a VPN service is not worth it. Lost of money, labor results, and a good name can be much more expensive.