4 Reasons Your Business Should Use a VPN Service

Virtual private networks or VPNs are popping up on everyone's radar these days, from general users to full-on IT security pros. VPNs are a highly mature technology that originated largely with IT professionals looking to provide safe remote access to roaming users as well as securely connect different office sites to one another across the internet. But over the last few years, VPNs have pivoted sharply to become one of the most popular and indispensable tools in every privacy-conscious consumer's surfing toolkit. But does this newfangled version of VPN have what it takes to help businesses, too?

How Do VPN Services Work?

What's new about VPNs isn't its core tech but merely how it's being packaged for consumption. At its core, every VPN is essentially a tunnel; in fact, they're often described using that word. Simply picture the internet as a cloud and then imagine your particular session of traffic as a long stream of bits worming their way through that cloud to wherever you're web surfing—Amazon.com, CNN.com, or PCMag.com, for example. A VPN merely acts as a tunnel for your traffic, boring a hole through the cloud to form a safe "tube" through which your traffic can travel, safe from hackers and prying eyes. Its boring tool? Encryption. But personal VPNs offer a little bit more than simple data encryption.

In the days of yore, IT pros would implement VPNs using solutions that generally combined hardware and software. If your company used a VPN, then your IT staff would typically purchase a firewall or edge router that supported VPN tunneling at the hardware level. Then they'd also purchase the necessary number of VPN software client licenses to service the required number of users or sites. Every incoming VPN connection, then, cost your company both hardware and software dollars, and every tunnel originated at the user's device and ended at your company's router.

What's changed in the new model is that personal VPN clients are being sold as services. Companies such as NordVPN($3.09 Per Month + 3-Months Free (Up to 69% Off 2-Year Plan) at NordVPN) or Private Internet Access VPN will sell consumers the software portion of the VPN equation, basically a VPN application. Once installed, the app will establish that encrypted tunnel mentioned earlier, but it will do it with a server being operated by the VPN vendor instead of a router in your company's data center (NordVPN's server in this example). Once the consumer starts surfing the web or doing anything else in cyberspace, it will appear as though he or she is surfing from the vendor's server, not their actual home PC or other device.

That's important in case you're worried about privacy issues such as having your location or IP address tracked by corporations and governments or even by just the endless deluge of data miners being pumped into cyberspace by marketing firms. With a VPN, none of these organizations can track you farther than your VPN provider's server farms. What the VPN provider will or can tell authorities about your activities, on the other hand, is up to them, and it's something you should ask before purchasing.

Can VPNs Help Your Business?

A VPN service, then, is a consumer-oriented tool aimed mainly at keeping people's recreational web activities private. That's crucial to anyone surfing the web casually these days, but can it help a business?

Businesses generally employ VPNs to make sure that outside users accessing their data centers are authorized and using an encrypted channel. Or they use them to connect their New York City headquarters with the field office in White Plains, for example. They do that by creating a permanent VPN tunnel that IT establishes between the VPN-capable routers in NYC and those in White Plains. Such a connection lets the folks in White Plains see the entire corporate network as though they were in NYC, without having to log in every time they want to access a server or an app. That's great, but can something such as CyberGhost VPN($2.19 Per Month + 2 Months Free (83% Off 2 Year Plan) at CyberGhost VPN) fit into this scenario? Short answer: yes.

VPN services may not work exactly like the VPNs just described, but they nevertheless can have significant positive impact on your company's overall data safety. Below, we have compiled a list of four important benefits a VPN service can provide, especially for small to midsize businesses (SMBs).

1. Heightened Security. Even if your company has no need of site-to-site tunneling or formal remote access provisioning, you still likely have two important characteristics in common with larger businesses. First, you probably have resources in the cloud, whether it's data or business apps or both. And second, you probably have traveling or remote users. If your company has either or (more likely) both of these characteristics, then a VPN service can keep you more secure, without a big investment in data center-grade routing hardware. By deploying a VPN service to your users' devices, you're essentially creating a secure connection to whatever resource into which they're logging, whether it's files you have stored on Dropbox Business or apps you're providing via Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium. While both of those services offer security measures of their own, adding a VPN connection on your end can only keep you and your business safer.

2. Quick-and-Dirty Remote Access. In the aforementioned days of yore, IT pros would deploy VPN software to any user who needed to log into the data center from outside the office, be it from home or on the road. This is because all of the company's software was in that data center; not just data, but also all of its back-office apps. With the advent of web and cloud services, such as Google G Suite Business($12 Per User Per Month at Google Workspace) and Salesforce Sales Cloud, however, many companies (especially SMBs) have no need for a data center. Their apps are delivered via the cloud and their data is stored there, too. If you're in this scenario, then a personal VPN service lets your IT staff essentially deploy a secure remote access fabric without having to drop a dime on expensive networking gear. This is especially true if you take the time to select a VPN provider that will let your IT pros access the logging data accrued by their users. This way, your IT pros know not only who is using their VPNs but for what they're using them, just as they would with an entirely in-house VPN setup.

3. Geo-Independence. If you have business travelers hitting countries with strict internet access laws (China comes to mind), then you may bump into situations in which your users are blocked from accessing corporate resources across the open internet, simply because the country in question is blocking access to that particular website or service. Provided your VPN service works in those areas (and they usually do), using one means your users will essentially be able to use the internet as though they're still in the United States, even if physically located in a less free country. This benefit may apply to only a small portion of SMBs but, for those who need it, it's crucial. This is one area, however, in which you'll want to be very familiar with your VPN provider's privacy and logging policies. VPN providers that keep thorough logs have a lot of information to give to authorities should those they come asking. On the other hand, VPN providers that don't keep thorough logs can limit your IT people from using the service like a larger organization would use a identity management system. You'll need to read the provider's policy carefully, and then sit down with your IT people and find the appropriate balance for your organization.

4. Affordability. It sounds a little lame but, for SMBs that know they need to make their users and data safer but lack the deep tech budgets of larger organizations, investing in a VPN service account for every user can be one of the very best IT investments SMBs can make, next to implementing effective managed endpoint security and using a reliable web hosting service. Many VPN services come in well below $10 per user per month when purchased using a business licensing plan. Considering that this paltry sum now means every user session gets protected by military-grade encryption of data in transit, secure authentication, and secure access to web apps and services, it's not hard to see the SMB value in VPNs.