Building a Secure VPN

The VPN concept has been around for almost 10 years. Technologies that use public data lines for private corporate traffic promise companies a cornucopia of benefits—from saving money on expensive leased lines to a workforce empowered to access the entire wealth of corporate IT resources from any kind of connection anywhere on the globe. But as with other overhyped and overmarketed technologies, the devil is in the details.

The cost of VPNs has dropped dramatically and implementation has gotten much easier, but the VPN market is still confusing and crowded. Without proper research, planning, and deployment, a VPN can become a nightmare installation and an unusable system or even reduce your network's security.

The well-publicized case of the intruder who cracked Microsoft's VPN, accessed the corporate network, and almost made away with the company's precious source code should be a warning. VPNs offer many benefits but also open a hole into your network, usually bypassing your firewall or going right through it. So, you need to carefully consider which VPN product to choose and how to install and run it. . . .