VPN vs WAN

[jalanbharat]

We are planning on connection various offices at multiple locations through a cost-effective and reliable solution. The idea of a hosted-VPN seems the most reasonable at the moment. However, there are more questions than answers at this point and I would be grateful if someone could address the following questions ASAP. Thanks

· How do you decide if you need a VPN or a WAN for 30 geographically-dispersed users?

· Can you access VPN over dial-up? What is the advantage/disadvantage over broadband (DSL) aside of speed?

· Can you dial into a VPN over a dumb terminal

· What is the minimum hardware/software infrastructure needs for a VPN/WAN

· Can you partition data (app wise/business unit wise) in the third-party host provider?s server?

· Is there a way to enforce that recent data is uploaded to the central repository?

· Third-party reliability ? back up, disaster recovery, security, administration

· Do you have to have a minimum config on the machine to run VPN?

[j-block]

- How do you decide if you need a VPN or a WAN for 30 geographically-dispersed users?

It's more cost effective to have a regular internet connection for VPN's than to have dedicated leased lines.

- Can you access VPN over dial-up? What is the advantage/disadvantage over broadband (DSL) aside of speed?

Yes. Dial is usually less expensive than broadband if you can put up with the hassle of dialing up and the lower bandwidth.

[jalanbharat]

What is the advantage of a VPN over a secure socket layer connection? What is the difference between me logging into a SSL server with www.https...as opposed to having a VPN. Aren't both of these mediums using encryption to secure data...then why VPN?

[b-krigeris]

VPN will secure data which can't be secured by other means like SSL. Building a VPN tunnel between two networks will emulate a point-to-point circuit. Sometimes VPN is called "poor man's private line". You can establish trust between NT domains or Active Directories over VPN and anything else you can do over a private line. Still, VPN will be slower that a private line and ISPs for all of the sites need to be the same provider so VPN packets don't ride over different ISPs' backbones.

[andyofne]

The company at which I was recently hired has contracted with an outside agency to provide a VPN solution for three people working from home.

The work at home folks are located in three different areas in three different towns and each has a different Cable internet provider.

All three of them have had difficulty working over the VPN with upwards of 25% packetloss and pings to the company server of over 300ms.

Currently, they connect through a VPN server several states to the East and then hop back here to work.

I am looking for a better solution which will eliminate the middle man and their VPN server.

Should I expect to see a reasonable performance increase by eliminating the VPN server in Indiana and setting up my own VPN solution locally or will the fact that the home workers are on cable modems through different ISP's continue to cause issues?

[b-krigeris]

We have several lan-lan VPN tunnels all coming form PIX firewalls to VPN 3015. They are all on the same backbone (ISP) and is working out verywell. We also have 50 remote users coming in to VPN 3015 in NY as far away as California. The are all working out well, even including dial-up people.