The article covers

• ERP’s business needs
• VPN use in banking sector
• Necessities of Business
• Applications Requiring Secure Communications
• VPN services in the market

Globalization has brought about decentralization and outsourcing. . WAN has helped corporates with a means of effective and timely running of various offices situated all over the globe Data was secure over these private networks and large corporations started using computer networks rather than the then courier services. It is untenable for Small business and SOHO-small-office-home-office to have private leased lines. The alternative cost effective medium was the internet but this was subject to risks for spoofing and eavesdropping. Hacking, spying, viruses and worms have been a major loss to business.

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) the answer to WAN is now attracting many organizations, small and large alike, to establish cost effective, secure communication channels between global offices or employees. The savings on communication for many corporations, who have switched to VPN, is around 30% to 80%. Quality of service (priority to critical information over general emails or web browsing) being paramount for VPN is now being offered by some ISP’s. By rising to the occasion they are providing quality VPN services such that businesses migrate from WAN to VPN.

VPN use in financial sector has increased due to business management and a variety of its concepts requiring information technology and computers.

Enterprise Resource Planning has resulted in many specific software applications that require interconnectivity to maintain the ever growing enterprise. ERP’s business needs are

• Inventory control, resource planning, customer service departments
• Integrate the various departments of business including CRM.
• Rapid exchange of information between the various departments
• Effective project planning and execution depending on the current information.

Earlier Implementation was WAN with leased lines, frame relays and T1 lines for connection. IP VPN has a better performance over and ISDN infrastructure providing VoIP and a flexible architecture of implementation that takes the load of the corporate server for client to client connections. VPN’s Class of service agreement assigns priority to the information transferred across it network and so business critical information is transferred first at a faster rate when compared to other information.

VPN use in banking sector is registering a growth due to personalized banking and e-banking. With authentication, encryption and different data communication methods banking grew to accept online secure transactions. The growing needs of the banking sector is

• Internet Access to account information
• Wireless and Mobile money transactions
• Account transaction between companies using internet as a means of communication

IP VPN has brought about a range of encryption and authentication techniques that the bank can use. It has also brought voice over the internet, which is a merging of technologies making it easier to implement and better in performance.

Necessities of Business

Security

Security of a business is important and VPN in the internet infrastructure is providing security with its protocols that authenticate and encrypt the communications taking place over the end points in the network.

Convergence

Business enterprises that are CRM based require voice and data networks. Voice, video and network security are now being bundled together on VPN networks.

Scalability

Every business grows and the infrastructure should be able to meet its growing demands. With increase in the bandwidth traffic performance of VPN is met. Also the security and other complexities related to hardware and software’s are changed. VPN is adapting to the growth though rather slowly

Cost Effectiveness

Since the infrastructure is shared and it is not a private leased line cost dramatically decreases when VPN technologies are used.

Reliability

The network has to provide a reliable redundant and fault tolerance service for it to become popular

Flexibility

The approach to setting up a network of different topologies according to your needs for voice and data are now provided with VPN networks

Class of service

The ability to provide the user customized service according to his requirement has prompted many IP VPN service providers to offer advanced Class of Services appropriate to specific traffic patterns and business.

Applications Requiring Secure Communications

• B2B-Business-to-business applications with customers, suppliers and partners
• VoIP for enterprises looking for converged services rather than having a separate PSTN-Public switched telephone network.
• Teleworkers who work from outside the office premises.
• Wireless VPN
• Storage Area Networks setup by large corporations
• EAI – Enterprise Application Integration for web based CRM

Continue to: VPN services in the market