Why not just have everything connected to the internet with a username and password?
A VPN encrypts the connection between you and the company’s server. Employees may be working with sensitive information that the company doesn’t want public, and while a simple username and password should prevent unauthorised users from accessing the system, it would not stop somebody from eavesdropping on the connection of an authorised user.
HTTPS encryption would be an alternative, but VPNs operate at a lower level than HTTP and can therefore be used to secure all internet traffic originating from the employee’s computer, not just the web browser.
A VPN ensures all traffic between the computer and the company is secured. It makes it exactly as though you are on the corporate network. Among other things:
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Companies have a lot of legacy services that they can’t easily update (the vendor may even be out of business) but which are business-critical. Without a VPN, all of those have to have excellent security. With a VPN, you can focus on securing a couple of services (VPN and a firewall) against outside attack instead of on securing all your applications.
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A VPN allows devices to present themselves as on the corporate network. Depending on what the company does, this might be useful to access external resources (for instance, university library resources are often IP-filtered, so that you don’t need to log in on campus. VPNs work well with that).
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VPNs let you connect two networks (they’re not just individual-computer-connecting-to-network, they also include router-to-router VPNs). If you have multiple office locations, it’s convenient to have them on the same network; that allows people who are at work to access intranet sites without needing to enter a password. For server networks, this is even better: it puts your servers at different places behind the same firewall system.
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VPNs free you from IP address limitations. If you have two servers on the same IP, they can’t listen to the same port (your router needs to send packets to one or the other). VPNs mean you don’t need to worry about getting a public IP for your payroll server, which only employees need to access.
When you use a VPN, your computer become an extension of your company network, it use an IP from the range of IP used by your company, admins can check the traffic from and to your computer… and it’s way more secure, if you do not possess an authorized IP, you cannot connect on your company’s network, so even if your login/password are cracked, without the good IP the “villain” cannot be connected
If everything was connected directly, that would also be risky. Anyone could just stroll up and start trying to hack away at it, or do a DDoS. Plus, you’d be susceptible to man in the middle attacks, or other means of recording what you’re doing. By using a VPN, everything you’re doing is encrypted.
Plus, you typically don’t have just a username and password for corporate stuff. You end up having many layers of security. You wouldn’t want someone trying to brute force their way into accounts on your network, would you? Even with most password policies that would lock the account, the attackers are using bots to do all this so doesn’t matter to them. Meanwhile you’re getting locked out every few minutes as the next wave rolls through.
All of what has been mentioned plus this:
Our phones are all cisco ip phones. A vpn allows satellite locations to have phones on our network. Zero land line or long distance fees.
A VPN does put everything over the internet with a username and password. The VPN is meant to change how the computers are connected over this virtual private network so that computer behave as if they are connected to a physical private network. A VPN also encrypts and protects all traffic over the VPN, even if the computers are connecting to different servers in the network. The difference being that even over HTTPS, a regular hacker can tell that you are going to your bank, Amazon, YouTube, etc even though they don’t know exactly what you are doing. With a VPN, a hacker only knows that you are connecting to the VPN servers, it can’t see what computers within the VPN you are connecting too. This adds an additional layer of protection and makes it even harder for hackers to gain information about the happenings on the network.
For example, with just HTTPS, China can tell that the Pentagon is talking to the President and when, even though it can’t tell what they are talking about. With a VPN, China can’t tell if the Pentagon is talking to the President, or instead DOJ or the CIA or anyone else.