To VPN or not to VPN? Please advise

[jlepich]

Here’s the deal. We have a satellite office that connects back to our corporate office via a fiber link that is supplied by our local ISP. This link is not live to the Internet but does traverse our ISP’s equipment at their NOC. In this case should I implement a LAN-to-LAN VPN over the link because the traffic is traversing our services providers’ network?

Thanks for any advice!

-Jesse

[mnaveen]

Hi Jesse,

You *CAN* connect your satellite office to your corporate office. The only concern is that the gateway at the satellite office connecting to your ISP will have a constant ip address or not. If it has a constant globally routable ip address (given by your ISP), then you can go for a static crypto map at both sites in your VPN configuration; else if it is changing, then go for static crypto map at the satellite office end and dynamic crypto map at the corporate office end. It doesn't matter where all the packets go through when you configure VPN as long you can reach the other end.

Hope this is clear to you. Feel free to write back if you need anything else.

Naveen.

mnaveen@cisco.com