What is a VPN?

Nowadays, especially during the pandemic, more and more people are working from home. As most of them need to access company resource they are connected via a VPN. But was is exactly a VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a way to extend your company’s network for employees working from home or even remote sites of your company that are at the other end of the globe.

1. The acronym

The V in VPN stands for Virtual. Virtual because a VPN connection will never be a physical network that you can see.

The P stands for Private, because over this VPN only participating devices will be communicating and no strangers/attackers will have access to it.

The N stands for Network because the way users are communicating is exactly the same as on any other network.

2. The types

As you could read in the introduction, there are different types of VPN:

• The client VPN: where one client (resource/computer) is connecting to the rest of your corporate network
• The Site to Site (S2S) VPN: where you extend your corporate network with a remote site (of the same company or a partner/customer) via what is also referred to a Site to Site tunnel)

3. The private part of VPN

As most of these VPNs happen over the internet, which is a public network that anyone can use, a VPN offers encryption so that the data that is sent between both parties (either the client and the company network or site A of a company and site B of a company) It also guarantees data integrity (makes sure that the data is not altered during transit) and authentication and authenticity (making sure that the parties involved in the VPN are really who they say they are)

4. The advantage(s)

The main advantage of Virtual Private Network setups is that they are relatively cheap for the user and for the company involved. The only two things you need is internet and a firewall that supports both client connectivity and S2S VPN configuration (most of them do right out of the box.) For some of the client VPNs a client might have to be installed on the user’s computer.

Again, there is way more to be told about VPNs but the above should already give you a good understanding how VPNs work.

Please let me know in the comments if you have questions or remarks and I will try to address them as soon as possible.