Probably, everyone has heard about the VPN. At least the word. Living in the age of computer technologies means more opportunities in terms of being flexible and having limitless access to all the working and leisure sources. At the same time, it brings more threats related to data exposure, information leakage, and personal identity stealing. On Udemy only, almost two million people are studying cybersecurity.

This proves the fact that more and more people recognize the need to have a good knowledge of staying safe online. Best protection practices will be relevant for all types of categories starting from people who are just getting acquainted with the technologies to tech specialists as the latter sometimes do not take these threats seriously. 

Speaking about the protection measures, a virtual private network, more commonly known as VPN is the most affordable and easy to use. 

As for its primary function, it establishes a tunneling connection from the source network to the target one. Why one may need it? Most often, it’s used to overcome the geo-restrictions (sometimes government blocks certain resources in their countries, one of these examples is the Great Firewall of China). One more popular use is to ensure cyber protection when accessing the required sources from not safe places such as public internet connections.

Lastly, people who use VPN want to increase the anonymity level as all the connections to public websites or other resources will be initiated from the IP address that belongs to a given VPN provider. It should be mentioned though that you cannot completely hide your traffic behind the VPN since the connection to it is present in the logs of a local provider and some VPN services are logging the sessions as well. 

As a business owner, you can enjoy some extra advantages of using a VPN. No matter whether you are a solopreneur or a small team, it’s valid for all business types. So let’s have a short overview of these benefits.

Internal resources protection

When running a business, you certainly have the information that should not be shared with anyone outside your organization. Among the sources of such information are your internal knowledge base, support system tools that are utilized by your employees, financial information, performance reports, and others.

It may happen that as a result of social engineering attacks or by mistake your employee gives out the links to these resources that can be used with malicious intents. It may sound as if it’s a bit outdated method, still, the cases that lead to companies losing millions of dollars, like with Toyota in 2019 when they were approached by fraudsters to change the bank account information in the wire transfer are happening every day.

Taking into account that it happens even with the most powerful technology companies, training the personnel and taking extra precautions to protect your sensitive data is a must. If these sources of information are accessible only within the internal network provided by VPN, these evil plans will not come true as the requests to any system tools will not reach them and will be simply dropped.  

Even if you don’t have internal resources, an admin dashboard of your website is one of the points that require restricted access.

Easy connection to your workplace from any location

It may seem that in order to protect your internal networks only the IP of your offices can be used. When restricting access to your sensitive information within your local network it may happen that your employees may require access to internal resources in order to sort out some urgency or have access while having a business trip. VPN solves this issue by allowing to access the internal tools after proper authorization (usually, 2 FA methods and authenticators are used to prevent the cases when the login and password are simply guessed). 

One little precaution: make sure to use at least one extra VPN server for the cases when there are some maintenance or technical issues with the main one to ensure an uninterrupted connection.

Extra security layer

Enabling access only within a separate private network does not only give the possibility to make these resources unavailable from all other locations. You can set up extra protective measures such as blocking some unwanted traffic once the VPN connection is on, set up firewall rules in the system to protect your communication, restrict uploading/downloading potentially malicious files and make your system protected against brute-force and other kinds of суber attacks that are aimed at stealing your sensitive data.  

Depending on the scale of your business, the choice of the right service varies. Needless to say, free solutions should not be considered in this case, as they slow down the connection, are not very reliable and can be blacklisted by many networks due to the illegitimate traffic. Many services offer trial periods so that it’s possible to test the quality of the service. Some large enterprises may even purchase separate servers to set up as a VPN connection as it gives more flexibility and ensures that their privacy is being handled by themselves. 

That being said, investing in a high-quality VPN service is always the right decision that will help to save on mitigating the risks later.