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Is VPN crucial for keeping company related material secure with remote employees?
I own a small company and business has been a little rough lately. I am requesting some of my employees to work from home more often. I am a little worried about outsiders getting into our email and possibly into secure files. Should I set up a VPN client for my employees? How much would VPN cost for 10 employees? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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6 Answers
You can make connections secure by using the SSL with the applications that your employees use. This just requires some configurations to be done on your firewall. If you're doing some file sharing, then you probably need VPN. There are a number of affordable and great small business solutions out there like Fortinet and Kerio, but check if your current firewall already offers VPN.
Dale, Sorry to hear business is going rough. I would agree with John that a VPN is a must but depending on your current setup it may be very inexpensive. If you would like I would be happy to answer some questions for you and give you a free consultation. Remote access is something I work with daily and I have a few ideas that may help you.
For small companies with light file sharing, you can also also use Google docs. It's free and secure.
It all comes down to, what do they need and when do they need it ?
How do they get their needed information now ?
If its just email there are almost aways web based solutions (OWA for example).
When it comes to the VPN portion, this depends on your existing infrastructure you might already be sitting on something with VPN capability (MS RRAS, Sonicwall, Cisco) so cost could very well be quite minimal.
Again the first step of this is to clearly define the users need. Fire away with any questions you might have, I suspect they've been asked before.....LOL
VPN will secure any type of traffic in the transit whether its intended information or whether its malicious . There must be two different ways to get assurance that traffic is clean and is not malicious.
VPN will only provide authentication , authenticated traffic but it will not cover emerging issues like malware ,bots ,Spam and any other type of intrusions through trusted tunnels.
What can be done is to make sure that VPN should provide strong authenticated traffic and , Firewall should be able to forward only legitimate traffic.
Application accessing and communicating through VPN should be monitored through IDS and IPS.
There may be other risks as well so do a good study on the emerging threats and always believe that there is devil in the details :)
I would go with either VPN (IPSec) or go with an SSL VPN solution such as Sonicwall. There are multiple risks as have been mentioned but I would say measure the risk to your organzations and go with the solution that is most cost effective.
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