“Do you have a distributed network you need to secure? Want
to connect those remote offices to your central site but don’t need
the headache of managing numerous remote devices? Do you need to
support both remote offices and traveling users? Have we got a deal
for you! The use of VPNs (virtual private networks) to support
remote users who connect to the corporate network over the Internet
is growing quickly and with good reason. Just the cost savings in
long-distance charges for remote users and leased lines are enough
to justify the pain and agony of installing and managing a VPN. And
those savings can be realized for remote offices as well.”
“As the number of VPN gateways increases, so does the need for
smart, robust, centralized management, because you don’t want to
increase your workload proportionally. There is some help on the
way. As the VPN becomes more critical to your operations, many
vendors are adding support for integration and high-availability
features that let the gateway leverage existing services for
authentication, configuration and logging. Leveraging existing
services should reduce much of the management overhead.”
“In addition to the management hurdles, configuring a VPN using
equipment from multiple vendors is gnarly. At this point, support
for IPsec (IP Security) interoperability isn’t making much
difference.”