Vpn what is it good for

In most situations, employees and others using your internet connection will not be throttled based on their internet usage, but using a VPN allows companies to conceal their data transmissions and eliminate the possibility altogether.

IP addresses indicate where the device is located as it browses the internet, streams content, or engages in other online activity. Some sites and services do not allow users from certain countries to access some or all of what they have to offer. This is common with streaming services that cater to specific locations. It is also common for some business websites to limit how you can use their public work services based on where you are, such as getting quotes or accessing more specific information about their services.

If you use a VPN, you can make it look like you are using the internet from a location that is acceptable to the service you are trying to access.

If your employees need to have full access to all safe information and services offered by websites, a VPN can make it easier. While a private network can help your business get off the ground, the cost of expanding the network can be prohibitive. If you use a VPN server, you can provide access to many employees and remote workers simultaneously.

You can also run key applications in a cloud environment and give them access through the secure tunnel of the VPN. This can include anything from email to full-blown applications that you would normally run on a desktop computer. When employees connect to the VPN, they gain access to another computer that you use to run the application they need.

Each employee with a login can access the VPN and therefore the application. Adding more employees is only a matter of providing more bandwidth, if necessary, and the login credentials to each new team member. With a VPN setup that incorporates cloud computing architecture, you have the opportunity to save considerable money on support services.

For example, with an on-site setup, the performance and upkeep of the in-house server is typically the job of internal IT staff. This may involve hours of checking how well the server is performing, whether all employees are achieving optimal throughput, and whether it is under attack by hackers or malware. In addition, when an issue is identified, more time needs to be allocated to addressing it and the fallout it may have caused within your organization.

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Adaptable to Numerous Smart Devices While many of us may first try a VPN on a company-loaned laptop, many VPN services also protect other smart devices such as your phones, tablets and desktop computers.

Smart Savings If you are willing to put in a little research, a VPN can help you save money via its location spoofing capabilities. Featured Partners. Learn More On Privateinternetaccess. VPNs are not foolproof and, like any software, can be susceptible to hacks and malware. Was this article helpful? Share your feedback. Send feedback to the editorial team. Rate this Article. Thank You for your feedback! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

Best Of. Read More. More from. By Christine Organ Contributor. Using free software is not an effective solution for ensuring VPN security because it often will not protect data and browsing activity on the internet. Key reasons not to use a free VPN include:. A VPN from a reliable provider will feature encryption for the user's data and online browsing history to shield them from hackers and ISPs.

Is using VPN safe? That is reliant on a provider that ensures online privacy, provides transparent privacy policies, fixes data leaks, and does not track its users.

The best VPN tool or application contains the following features:. The FortiGate VPN offerings are high-performance, scalable VPNs that provide users and organizations with access control and consistent security policies across all their applications, devices, and locations. Skip to content Skip to navigation Skip to footer.

How Secure is a VPN? If your company controls the originating point say a sales office and the endpoint like a VPN server at your corporate HQ , you can be quite well assured unless there's a bug that your data is securely transmitted. This is for those of you who compute in hotels or at coffee shops and connect to web applications like social networks, email, banks, or shopping sites. Consumer VPN services help ensure that those communications are protected.

The VPN service provides a secure tunnel between your computing device whether laptop, phone, or tablet and the provider's data center.

This is important to understand. Consumer VPN services protect your transmission from your location to their location, not from your location to the destination application you're using. If you think about it, this makes sense: A consumer VPN service is operated by a completely different company than, for example, Facebook or your bank. The VPN service gives you an app that you run on your local device, which encrypts your data, and it travels in its encrypted form through a tunnel to the VPN service provider's infrastructure.

At that point, the data is decrypted and sent on its way. Two things happen here: First, if you're using an https connection, your data is encrypted by your browser and then by your VPN app. Your data is decrypted only once at the VPN data centre, leaving the original encryption provided by the browser intact.

That encrypted data then goes on to the destination application, like your bank. The second thing that happens is that the web application you're talking to does not get to see your IP address.

This allows you some level of anonymous networking. This IP spoofing is also used to trick applications into thinking you're located in a different region or even a different country than you are located in. There are reasons both illegal and legal to do this. We'll discuss that in a bit. We've already discussed the use of a VPN when connecting offices. Any time you have two LANs that need to link over the public internet, you should consider using VPN technology or an equivalent method of enterprise protection.

We talked about two use cases above for consumer VPN services: Protecting your data and spoofing your location. We'll talk more about location spoofing later, so let's focus on data protection for now. When you're away from home or the office, and you connect to the internet, you'll most often be doing so via Wi-Fi provided by your hotel or the restaurant, library, or coffee shop you're working out of at that moment.

Sometimes, Wi-Fi has a password. Other times, it will be completely open. In either case, you have no idea who else is accessing that network. Therefore, you have no idea who might be snooping on your internet traffic, browsing history or online activity. Here's a good rule of thumb: If you're away from the office or home, and you're using someone else's Wi-Fi even that of a family member or a friend, because you never know if they've been compromised , use a VPN.

It's particularly important if you're accessing a service that has personally-identifying information. Remember, a lot goes on behind the scenes, and you never really know if one or more of your apps are authenticating in the background and putting your information at risk.

Another reason you might choose to use a VPN is if you have something to hide. This isn't just about folks doing things they shouldn't do. Sometimes people really need to hide information. Take, for example, the person who is worried an employer might discriminate against him or her because of their sexual orientation or medical condition.

Another example is a person who needs to go online but is concerned about revealing location information to a person in their life who might be a threat. And then, of course, there are those people in restrictive countries who need to hide their activity merely to gain access to the internet without potentially grave penalties.

It costs a lot to provide the infrastructure to operate a VPN service, from the network pipes to the servers. That infrastructure has to be paid for somehow. If user fees do not pay for it, advertising, data gathering, or some nastier reason are likely to be paid for. Here's another reason not to use a free service, and this one is a lot scarier: Malware providers and criminal organizations have set up free VPN services that not only don't protect you but actively harvest personal data, and either use it or sell it to the highest bidder.

Instead of being protected, you're being plundered. To be fair, not all pay VPN services are legitimate, either. It's important to be careful about which you choose. I've put together an always up-to-date directory of quality VPN providers. Some are better than others and that's reflected in their ratings. But all are legitimate companies that provide quality service. Beyond my directory, it's always good practice to Google a company or product name and read the user reviews.

If you see a huge number of old complaints or new complaints suddenly start showing up, it might be that there's been a change of management or policies. When I'm looking for a service, I always base my decision partially on professional reviews and partially based on the tone of user reviews. Finally, be sure to choose a service with the capabilities that meet your needs. You may need one or more features only provided by certain services.

So, think through your needs as you make a decision. Oh, heck no. A VPN can help ensure you're not snooped on when connecting between your computer and a website.

But the website itself is quite capable of some serious privacy violations. For example, a VPN can't protect you against a website setting a tracking cookie that will tell other websites about you.

A VPN can't protect you against a website recording information about products you're interested in. A VPN can't protect you against a website that sells your email address to list brokers. Yada, yada, yada. A VPN does help protect you in the situations we've discussed in previous sections.

But don't expect a VPN to be a magical privacy shield that will keep everything you do private and confidential. There are many, many ways your privacy can be compromised, and a VPN will be of only partial help. That would be a definite maybe. Here's the thing: Back in the day, the process of encrypting and decrypting packets would take a toll on CPU performance. Most current CPUs are now fast enough that most crypto algorithms can run without much of an impact on processor performance. However, network performance is another thing entirely.

First, keep in mind that if you're using a VPN, you're probably using it at a public location. That public Wi-Fi service is likely to range in performance somewhere between "meh" and unusable. So, just the fact that you're remotely working on a mediocre network will reduce performance. But then, if you connect to a VPN in a different country, the connection between countries is also likely to degrade network performance.

Server locations matter. My rule of thumb is to use a domestic VPN and connect to servers as close to my location as possible. That said, I have had good nights and bad nights getting online.

On my recent trip, I found most hotels' networks to become unusable after about 9pm. My theory is that many of the guests were watching Netflix at that time, completely clogging the hotels' pipes. Some do. Some don't. Look at that directory I mentioned earlier because that's one of the factors where a service might lose some points.

Some VPN services will limit the total amount of data you can send and receive, either in one connection session or over a month.