Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are quite honestly an amazing technology. It is hard to deny that almost every person who watches TV or views ads on their favorite streaming platform has seen one of the many VPN providers pitch their claim. But why are they so important to have anyway? And why does it seem that there are so many more VPN providers and advertisements these days? This article is for anyone who doesn’t use a VPN and even those who already do. In my opinion, everyone should have a personal VPN for their online engagements. Work VPNs are no longer enough. Let me tell you why.
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What Is a Virtual Private Network?
One of my favorite ways to explain a VPN to someone is by using a morning work commute example. Imagine you work in a large metropolitan area, where you live on one side of the metro and you work on the other. In this case, let’s use New York City. Even though I would never recommend driving through New York City, let’s pretend that there is no other way to make it to work. You set off on your drive early in the morning in hopes that you will safely make it to work in one piece without anyone ripping off your license plates or breaking into your car to steal your precious EZ Pass! Although you know the dangers that your commute could entail, you put your big boy or big girl pants on and move forward into the unknown. You’ve made this commute 99 times already, but you also know that it would only take one bad commute to ruin your life. Oh, the horror! Now imagine you’re on the Internet where everyone is anonymous and there is web traffic that travels all over the globe. Don’t forget that the Internet doesn’t exist in some void, it is all electrical impulses going over some medium like cars on a street.
Now, what if instead of driving through the busy city streets, you had a tunnel dug underneath the city that went underground inside your enclosed garage and came out inside the gated parking lot where you work? You wouldn’t have to worry about collisions with other cars or people stealing your license plates and EZ Pass. You still must follow the rules of the road, and there are still hubs that connect other tunnels, but traffic is heavily managed and strictly enforced so that your car’s integrity would never be compromised. This is what a virtual private network does for your online data traffic! We’re saved!
A Virtual Private Network creates encrypted tunnels that protect and preserve the integrity and confidentiality of information traveling over the Internet. This is accomplished using standard tunneling protocols such as IPsec and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) to name a couple. When you connect to a VPN, your device first establishes a secure, authenticated connection with the other routing device. Once you have successfully negotiated authentication with that device, the two devices then negotiate what kind of encryption will be used to make your data confidential. After these conditions are met, the result is a secure channel of data transmission. Once your traffic leaves the tunnel on the other side, it is treated as any other traffic on the Internet outside of the VPN. This opens up a load of really cool features for personal VPN use which will be discussed in the next section.
Organizations often use VPNs with their employees to allow remote workers the ability to access organizational resources outside of the physical network area. If configured properly, organizations can rest assured knowing that their sensitive information is not traveling over insecure paths on the Internet between the network and the remote worker. If the organization practices good cyber hygiene, you shouldn’t even be able to access organizational resources remotely if you aren’t on the VPN. Enterprise organizations will also use VPNs to connect different sites within campus networks or even those across the country. This allows secure communication between core corporate systems and branch offices or other facilities within a campus. These VPN tunnels use the same connection protocols as personal VPNs but often remain permanently connected for business purposes.
Why Should I Have a Personal VPN?
It does not matter who you are or how insignificant you feel that you are in the great expanse of the Internet, everyone these days needs a VPN. Security is their fundamental principle and people need online security more now than ever before. The current threat landscape on the wide-open Internet is very unsafe and unpredictable. Believe me when I tell you that this is not a scare tactic to get you to buy a VPN (in fact there are many free ones out there), it is simply a fact. Look at any hacker forum on the Internet and you will see that the tactics, techniques, and procedures that even amateur hackers use are very simple to deploy on anyone of their choosing. Even further, your insecure online traffic may be intercepted by an attacker somewhere along its path and have its contents read in plaintext. The prudent thing to do is to protect yourself and use a VPN.
In addition to all the scary things out there, VPNs also offer a host of capabilities that improve your everyday life! For example, many people use VPNs to access content on their favorite streaming platforms that they cannot see in their current location. All one needs to do is set their VPN connection to another country and they could have access to different shows they don’t get in their current country (DISCLAIMER: this does not work for all streaming platforms). Another cool capability is that you can create your own home-based VPN that allows you to access resources you keep at home from anywhere in the world. Imagine, for example that you created a Network Attached Storage (NAS) share that contained a bunch of the movies and TV shows that you have purchased and downloaded! Instead of paying $15 a month for that Netflix subscription, now you have all your favorites available to you from anywhere, paid for one time, for eternity! This could save you hundreds of dollars throughout your lifetime! Better yet, you can have as many people streaming the content as you want with no upcharges! Well, as much as your network devices can handle anyway.
As you can see, there are so many ways that VPNs can take your Internet activities to the next level of security and capability. But this begs the question, “Which VPN should I use?”
Which VPN Should I Use?
There are so many different personal VPN providers out there. Among them are names like NordVPN, Surfshark, and ExpressVPN. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but the one that I use and recommend is NordVPN. NordVPN provides a comprehensive VPN experience that allows you to select where you want to connect to, and how anonymized you want your data to be and even provides threat protection while you browse the web. What I like most about NordVPN is that it has a suite of affiliated applications that add to the overall improvement of your cyber-hygiene. Applications like NordPass (which provides a highly capable password manager), NordLocker (a secure, encrypted cloud storage option), and NordLayer (committed to network access security) give Nord Account holders the ability to secure their online lives with ease. While it is a paid service, there are various plan options to choose from that make testing and implementation easier. And for what it’s worth, if you get on at the right time of the year, you can sometimes purchase annual plans for up to 50% off! I think this is well worth the money.
For those who want a fun networking project to take their home network to the next level, I recommend using Tailscale to establish VPNs across your personal and home devices in a more user-configured fashion. Tailscale is a cool product that allows you to create a network between your home devices and establish exit nodes where your data is dumped onto the network. This becomes advantageous in the example I provided earlier about hosting a streaming service from a home storage setup. If you’re a networking nerd, or even if you want a VPN product that allows you to control your setup down to the details, Tailscale is a fantastic choice. Overall, you can’t go wrong with either of these two VPN providers.
Conclusion
Once you’ve employed a VPN service, you’re well on your way toward being well-protected online. While there are still many other threats out there that can access information in other ways, VPNs are a great place to start. Other protective measures such as password managers, encrypted cloud storage, and home network firewalls are also important to implement in your home “tech stack” these days, but those items will be covered in other posts at other times. For now, enjoy the peace of mind that comes along with secured online traffic!
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