Over the past few years, businesses in every industry have transformed from centrally located, one-campus behemoths into highly distributed, tightly networked clusters of offices at dispersed locations. The reasons are obvious: A distributed environment offers too many advantages to be ignored, including greater hiring flexibility, lower overhead costs, and increased worker satisfaction. (Incidentally, the shift to a distributed work environment has also been an important move for the InfoWorld Test Center in the past year, as we work to more closely simulate the evolving real-world enterprise environment.)

But one big problem with a distributed environment is the high cost of keeping up network connections between distributed offices. WAN expenses alone can take a huge chunk out of your company's IT budget, especially as the number of offices grows. Most of those costs go directly to leased-line connections, which are expensive enough when you only need to link one office, never mind a multitude of remote locations.

That's why VPNs have become such a key technology for businesses trying to link distributed offices and employees. With a VPN, you can link offices as well as business partners without leased lines. A VPN enables you to connect offices far and wide by using the existing Internet infrastructure and connectivity at each office. Moreover, VPNs ensure secure communications between offices, allow mobile workers to connect through their dial-up connections (by using a software VPN client), and make it easier for your IT staff to configure client and server machines.

Last year was a banner year for VPNs, both in terms of their adoption and the technological breakthroughs that accompanied them. One of the most important advances was the increased availability of IPSec-capable routers and software VPN clients, which have helped even small businesses roll out secure VPN connections to remote offices, employees, and business partners worldwide. Software VPN clients are now available for all the major operating systems, including Windows, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux, and the Mac OS. And all the major enterprise router vendors have added VPN support to their firewall products.

Of course, VPN connections aren't the solution to every WAN problem. If you need guaranteed bandwidth and low ping times for a mission-critical application, you're still better off with a dedicated WAN connection. Nevertheless, a company in that position could still benefit from a VPN; the VPN could serve less time-critical applications such as e-mail and file transfers.

Even though VPNs usually lead to cost savings, they don't come cheap: The initial infrastructure costs of setting up a VPN can be substantial for a large network. You'll need to pay for a high-end, specialized VPN router for your central office -- something like the Cisco PIX firewall/VPN box. You can save costs at your smaller remote offices, which can make do with lower-end routers. And dial-up users or business partners can connect to the network with a simple software application loaded on their PCs or laptops.

In 2001, we're likely to see further advances in the availability of VPN hardware and software options. This will ease deployment costs and increase the overall usefulness of VPN connections between business partners. We'll also see VPN support included in a wider range of routers and more VPN client software bundled with enterprise networking and network management packages. And technological advances in VPN management and monitoring will help IT departments optimize their connections -- and lower their overall networking costs in the bargain.

Technology of the year

The evolving VPN has been a key enabling technology as businesses shift from a highly centralized communications model to a more distributed and flexible one. VPNs allow businesses to perform secure networking over the public Internet, thereby reducing costs.

» posted by abennett

InfoWorld

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