Technology Which Made Work From Home Possible - VPN (Virtual Private Network)

Introduction

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network.Virtual Private Network, as the name suggest, connecting to your private network over the public network aka internet. Initially, VPNs were introduced and used among large enterprises, defence organization, banking companies etc. to keep their data secure. A VPN created a pathway through which people working in large organizations could access the data they want, remotely, in a secured manner. Times have changed and with it the popularity of VPN too! These days VPNs are so widely available that they are used by almost every one of us.For example, you need VPN to access your office network from home. Virtual tunnel is formed between two ends, user data flows inside this tunnel.

How does a virtual private network (VPN) work?

A VPN extends a corporate network through encrypted connections made over the Internet. Because the traffic is encrypted between the device and the network, traffic remains private as it travels. An employee can work outside the office and still securely connect to the corporate network. Even smartphones and tablets can connect through a VPN.

What does a VPN  exactly do?

A VPN is a way of joining two private networks some distance apart into one network using the Internet to carry packets confidentially between the two private networks. Packets from the one network are encrypted by one end of the VPN, sent over the Internet to the other end, where they are decrypted and forwarded over the other network. So you can access all the computers on both networks as if they were local, but nobody else on the Internet can see them.

Benefits of using a Virtual Private Network(VPN):

1.) Security - VPN helps  in accessing a data more securely, it does so with the help of Cryptography. In Cryptography, the data is encrypted from the sender’s end and then it gets decrypted with the help of a unique key on the receivers end.

2.) Being Anonymous - In the age of internet  being anonymous  comes as an urgency from time to time. When Internet traffic routed through  ISP(Internet Service Provider), they can monitor everything that we do online. Not only do they monitor, but they track user’s behaviour with the intention of selling our personal data to various advertisers and third-party service providers.

3.) Restricted Data Access - The data that is restricted in any country or even continent can be accessed easily by using VPN.

4.)  Remote access to private data among corporate,s team or colleagues can be done easily without any loss of data using VPN .

Different types of VPN

There are two basic types of VPNs.

Remote-access VPN allows users to connect to another network, be it the internet or their company’s internal system, through a private encryption tunnel.

Site-to-site VPN, is also called a router-to-router VPN. This type of VPN is mostly used within corporate environments, specifically when an enterprise has headquarters in several different locations.