Why Every Business Needs a VPN in the Digital Age
The internet has revolutionized business operations and opened a world of opportunities for companies to grow and reach new markets. However, it has also exposed businesses to new cyber threats that can cripple operations and put sensitive data at risk. This is why a virtual private network (VPN) is an essential tool for businesses in the digital age.
What is a VPN and How Does it Work?
A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. All internet traffic flows through this tunnel, which keeps the data secure from prying eyes.
Here‘s a simple analogy of how a VPN works:
Imagine sending a postcard through the regular mail. Anyone who handles that postcard along the way can easily read the message written on it. However, if you seal the message in an envelope no one can see what you wrote unless they open the envelope. A VPN essentially puts your internet connection in a sealed envelope to privatize your browsing.
The core functionality of a VPN includes:
- Encryption – Securely scrambles data so it is unreadable to outside parties
- Anonymity – Hides your real IP address and location
- Access Control – Allows employees to securely connect to company resources remotely
Now let‘s look at 5 compelling reasons your business needs to be utilizing VPN technology.
1. Bypass Geographic Restrictions
In today‘s global economy, businesses often need to connect internationally to serve customers, work with suppliers, manage remote teams, and expand operations.
However, you may encounter geographic restrictions when trying to access specific websites and apps overseas. Streaming sites like Netflix limit content based on licensing rights for different regions. Some news sites block access from other countries. Company intranets often only allow known IP addresses based on corporate offices and physical locations.
A VPN gives your business a way around these restrictions by masking your real location. Connecting through a VPN server in another country gives the appearance that you are accessing the internet from that location. This allows you to bypass geo-blocks so that your operations keep running smoothly no matter where your people are located.
2. Enhance Security in Public Places
The rise of mobile technology and remote work arrangements means employees are often working from cafes, hotels, airports, and other public places outside the office. While public WiFi offers convenience, it exposes mobile workers to security risks.
Public WiFi is inherently insecure. Hackers can spy on everything you do on these unsecured networks and steal passwords, financial information, and company data. A VPN adds a layer of protection that scrambles everything employees access over public connections so that hackers see only meaningless data if they intercept it.
3. Protect Your Sensitive Business Information
Every company handles sensitive information – customer data, financial records, trade secrets, proprietary documentation, confidential communications, and more. If this information gets into the wrong hands, the damage can be catastrophic.
A data breach often puts companies out of business permanently – just look at what happened to Ashley Madison. Many businesses that survive data breaches get tied up for years in legal issues and costs related to regulatory penalties, forensic investigations, public relations damage control, and loss of customer trust.
A VPN is vital for protecting your sensitive information from cybercriminals and other unauthorized access. By routing everything through encrypted VPN tunnels, your business can keep its data locked down tight. This allows you to operate securely regardless of where people access company resources from.
4. Safe Remote Access for Employees
The pandemic accelerated remote work arrangements for businesses globally. Offering employee remote access has many benefits – it improves continuity, reduces overhead costs, expands the talent pool when hiring, and boosts employee satisfaction as people don‘t need to waste time commuting.
However, traditional remote access setups that route everything straight over the open internet leave doorways for hackers to exploit. Servers get bombarded with login attacks from bots. Spoofed access points trick people into connecting to malicious gateways that steal their credentials. Staff use public WiFi and devices more prone to infections from spyware and keylogging.
Again, a VPN helps tremendously here. Using a VPN for remote access instead creates secure encrypted tunnels that keep everything safely encapsulated from external threats. This allows businesses to enable flexible work-from-home arrangements without compromising security.
5. Improve Network Performance
This last benefit surprises some people. Wouldn‘t wrapping connections in extra encryption slow things down?
Actually, VPNs can speed up network traffic under the right circumstances. Internet service providers often throttle traffic during peak congestion hours. This results in slow page loads, laggy video calls, file uploads crawling at a snail‘s pace, and similar performance frustrations.
VPNs counteract throttling by masking the types of internet traffic you generate. Your ISP can‘t identify the data to determine priority and throttle bandwidth-intensive functions like streaming and downloading large files. So everything moves faster through the network without discriminatory limits.
This means your remote teams maintain full working capabilities at all times. A Zoom presentation to clients won‘t get choppy right when you start screen sharing an important slidedeck. Employees can upload and download files without productivity roadblocks. Customers won‘t abandon your ecommerce shop due to videos buffering excessively on sluggish connections.
Better performance means happier, more effective teams and uninterrupted business operations.
The digital landscape grows more hostile by the day, and government restrictions inhibit internet freedom increasingly around the world. Businesses must adapt to this new environment to stay resilient.
Implementing VPN technology checks all the boxes – bypassing geographic barriers, securing data from exposure, protecting networks from intrusion, facilitating remote teams, and optimizing network throughput.
VPNs not only save companies money over the long run by preventing security disasters, they open new opportunities to access global markets and attract top notch talent that can work from anywhere.
The tiny upfront investment is well worth it. VPNs provide the missing defense layer for the modern digital business.
