For businesses that get a lot of work done while out of the safety and privacy of their offices, the importance of having a secure way to connect employees to important assets and data cannot be understated. To achieve these ends, many organizations implement what’s called a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. But what is a VPN, and how does it work to protect your business while out of the office?

Why Use a VPN?
The best way to understand what a virtual private network does, is to have a little background knowledge of why it’s necessary to have one. The easiest way to understand it is to think about accessing your business’ data as a two-lane road. On one side of the road is the traffic moving from your business’ infrastructure toward your device, and on the other side is data moving from your device to your business’ infrastructure. Anyone with the right tools can see the data as it’s being transported from one location to the next, and if the data isn’t protected by the right solutions, it can be stolen while it’s in transit. A VPN makes it much more difficult for hackers to accomplish this feat.

Understanding a VPN
Your average connection should be encrypted to protect the integrity of any data stored on it, and a virtual private network helps by augmenting this practice while out of the office. To aid in protecting your organization’s network connectivity, a virtual private network can encrypt your connection to sensitive data while on a different connection, such as if you’re working from a remote location, or just simply not in the office at the moment. When the data is encrypted, hackers have a harder time stealing the information that’s being sent to and by your devices while out of the office.

To be fair, it’s not that hackers can’t steal the data being sent to or by your devices while using a virtual private network; it’s that the data that hackers do steal is much less useful to them overall. The reason for this is the encryption. If the hacker can’t crack the encryption of the files, the can’t read the data, and, then the data they have just stolen is completely useless to them. Modern encryption methods are virtually impossible to decrypt (at least, the average hacker will spend more time than it’s worth to decrypt the data, making the process far less appealing than it normally would be).

Dresner Group can help your business set up the perfect virtual private network for all of its specific needs. Whether you’re out of the office momentarily or for a lengthy amount of time, or if you have remote workers in all corners of the globe, the right virtual private network can keep your data as secure as can be while it’s moving from one location to the next. To learn more, reach out to us at (410) 531-6727.