What is a VPN and why is it needed?

What is a VPN and why is it needed?

Government of many countries talk a lot about VPN: either they are going to ban it, then they recommend using it. In this article, we will talk about what a VPN is and why it is needed.

VPN is now more relevant than ever. Even in home routers, not just VPN servers began to appear, but also with hardware acceleration of encryption. What is a VPN and what is it for? Let's try to talk about this in simple words.

What is a VPN?

Somehow it happened that even in the textbooks they do not give an expanded and deep definition of what it is, a VPN. Like, and so everything is clear: the abbreviation VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, that is, a virtual private network. And why else discuss something? What is a “network” is understandable: at the primitive level, this is the union of two or more nodes with some form of communication so that they can exchange information. Naturally, in the most convenient way and with the support of all the necessary services.

What is “private” is also apparently obvious - not public, therefore private. That is, one in which there is not anyway who, but only the permitted nodes. If you dig a little deeper, it is this component of the VPN that is the most important, since it determines a number of requirements for this very “particular”.

Firstly, it is necessary to somehow label the participants of this network and the information that they exchange so that it does not mix with someone else's. Secondly, it is definitely useful to protect this information from prying eyes. Well, at least to encrypt, which again imposes the following range of restrictions related to the strength of this encryption.

Thirdly, it is necessary to maintain the integrity of this method of transmitting information - not to let outsiders into the private network, check the source of transmitted messages and ensure that information does not leak anywhere in the "naked form". In general, everything is like at private parties with the powerful of this world: they make noise all over the district, and who and what is doing there is not clear. And severe security at the entrance and exit suits not only face, but also other places control.

With the concept of "virtual" everything is a little simpler. It just means that such a network is abstracted from the physical component - it doesn’t matter to what and how many communication channels it is laid, since it works transparently for the participants in this network. Or, on the other hand, the physical network most often simply does not belong to the virtual user.

For example, in serious organizations of employees, when connecting a work laptop to any wired or wireless networks outside the walls of this organization, they are obliged to immediately use a VPN connection to the office network. It doesn’t matter through which jungle this connection will be established, but there is no doubt that it will go through public, foreign communication networks. Such a connection is usually called a tunnel, subsequently we will meet this term more than once.

What is a VPN for?

The above example of connecting a remote user to a corporate network is one of the most common VPN use cases. The user feels at home - or rather, at home, on vacation or on a business trip, he is able to feel at home and can use corporate services without any problems.

At the same time, an attacker will not be able to sniff just like that, what exactly this user is busy with, what kind of data he sends and receives. Moreover, in companies concerned about their own security, on all devices used by employees, the mandatory use of VPN connections is forcibly turned on anywhere. Even the use of the Internet in this case goes through the corporate network and under the strict supervision of the security service!

What is a VPN and why is it needed?

The second most common use case is similar to the first, but not individual users, but entire offices or buildings are connected to the corporate network. The goal is the same - reliably and safely combine geographically remote elements of one organization into a single network.

It can be either large representative offices of corporations in different countries, or meat stalls scattered around the city of LLC Horns and Hooves. Or even just cameras, alarms and other security systems. With such simplicity of creating a VPN - the benefit is that you do not need to pull the cable every time - virtual private networks can also be created within companies for combining and isolating certain departments or systems.

No less often VPNs are organized between servers or entire computing clusters to maintain their availability and data duplication. The frequency of their use is directly related to the growing popularity of cloud technology.