Advantages of SSL VPN

Computer security is in the back, if not the front, of every Internet user’s mind right now. Hacking, security breaches, identity theft and malicious bots are terms that show up in national news reports as well as user forums. Everything moving to the cloud is adding to the anxiety of anyone who has sensitive data and wants to keep it personal and private. Little wonder the interest in virtual private networks is greater than ever before.

What is a virtual private network and why would you want that instead of an actual private network?

The answer revolves around our desire for universal connectivity. Most companies started connecting to other locations using private line services, such as T1, DS3 and OC3. These are point to point connections that are reserved for your private use. Only you and the network operators have access to those wires and the data they are transporting. It’s fairly difficult for third parties to tap a private line and examine the packets moving back and forth.

Private lines are defined as private, but that’s not really good enough for high risk companies such as banks and brokerages. To thwart even the most dedicated line “tapper,” they encrypted their data to ensure it stayed private. Encryption is a process that takes plain text and jumbles it in such a way that it appears to be indecipherable nonsense to anyone looking. At the far end of the link, the text is decrypted and returns to its original form.

Private lines are great for communicating within organizations or with a select few suppliers, vendors, consultants and so on. But what if you want to interact with the public at large? For that you need a public, not a private, network. That’s exactly what the Internet was created to do.

The advantage of the Internet is that it connects to nearly every place and every person on Earth. That’s also its weakness. The same universal connectivity that makes it easy for billions of potential customers to reach your website makes it equally easy to do mischief or outright crime. If there was only a way to make the connection between you and your customer secure while still using the public Internet.

That solution is called the VPN or Virtual Private Network. A public network connection can be made virtually private by encrypting the packets that travel between two locations. Your particular stream of traffic is scrambled while the rest of the traffic flowing through the same network connections could be transmitted in the clear.

SSL or Secure Socket Layer is a popular technique to provide the encryption between source and destination. What makes it so popular is that SSL is supported by all modern Web browsers and many other programs, such as Email clients. There is no need to buy or configure separate encryption software used in other VPN approaches.

Anyone with an Internet connection and browser can connect securely to any site that supports SSL. The resulting connection can be called a SSL VPN. It only persists for the length of the session, but can be established at any time. You know that you are on a secure link because the address starts with https: rather than http: The “s” means secure.

Adding SSL to a site involves buying a digital certificate from a trusted certificate authority. That certificate attests to the fact that the site in question is who it says it is and not some impostor. The secure site presents the certificate to the client to prove legitimacy. It may also ask the user for authentication, such as user ID and password, to prove that the user is also legitimate.

What sites use SSL? Most any site handling financial transactions, such as banks, online stores that accept credit cards, webmail providers, cloud storage providers, remote access services, most sites that store personal data and require user logins, and businesses using the Internet to connect remote locations and home workers.

Do you need to provide secure connections for your business? If so, look into the costs and features of Affordable Virtual Private Network solutions. One or more may be just right for your particular needs.

Enterprise Cloud Communications Arrives

Cloud computing has been in the headlines as the next generation of information technology. What’s breaking out now is cloud communications, a move to make telephony as well as number crunching and file serving available as cloud services. You know it’s arrived when a provider the size of XO Communications launches an enterprise level cloud communications service.

In an odd way, what’s new is old. The origin of telephone services is in a cloud called the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Your basic phone is simply a client that derives its functionality from the massive telco switching network.

Then came in-house phone systems in the form of key telephone systems and PBX or Private Branch Exchange systems. These are essentially small phone companies that you own and maintain. All calls within the company stay on the internal system. It’s only when you need connectivity to the outside world that you have to rejoin the PSTN.

Telephone services are now moving back to the cloud, but with a difference. This time it's IP communications rather than switched circuits. It’s also not about a monolithic public network but private networking services with competitive features that go way beyond what the original telephone network was engineered to provide.

The new cloud communications offerings also go by the title of hosted PBX. The idea is that it is more efficient to establish a large IP switching center with a dedicated expert staff than for every business to be its own telephone company. The business users need only have the telephone handsets, speakerphone and similar desk equipment connected to their local networks. The large, expensive and hard to maintain switch moves out to the cloud.

Therein lies the key to cloud communications. It’s the rise of converged IP networks to handle voice, video and data, replacing separate dedicated networks for each. Once you’ve installed SIP phones on your LAN, it seems a bit inefficient to send that traffic to an in-house IP PBX system that connects to the PSTN with specialized analog and digital trunk lines. Why not keep all of the traffic on the converged network as long as possible?

That’s what XO says. They’ve built their business by creating an enormous fiber optic network footprint to provide digital connectivity to both businesses and other service providers. With an extensive converged network already in place, it’s logical for XO to add value by providing telephony solutions in their cloud. This way you have only one supplier for both network connectivity and the communication services running on that network.

The enterprise cloud communications model works especially well for companies with more than one business location. XO can tie your headquarters, regional offices and branches together as if they were in a single large facility. The converged WAN network give you all the standard calling features you expect in an enterprise telephone system plus high definition video conferencing and the ability to include mobile phones in a unified communications system. These communications services are priced on a per-seat-per-month basis.

Are you interested in upgrading your business communications while avoiding a massive capital investment? Look into future proofing your voice, data and video with hosted services in the cloud. Get pricing, features and availability on SMB and enterprise cloud communications services now.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.