

Instead, most companies opt to connect separated private LANs over the public internet geographically. But how do the LANs connect? For some very specialized solutions, companies lease private lines to connect the offices. In many cases, each of these offices also has LANs. They have branch offices, departments, and divisions that are geographically dispersed. But many businesses don't run out of one location. That's the private network inside one physical location - be it a home, a corporate building, or a campus. Most of us are familiar with the concept of a LAN, a local area network. One of the most important issues in understanding the limits of VPNs is understanding where the endpoint of the VPN server resides.
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The VPN software on your end then sends those packets to the VPN server at some destination point, decrypting that information.

The way a VPN works is by encrypting those packets at the originating point, often hiding the data and the information about your originating IP address.
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Eventually, it reaches the ZDNet infrastructure, which also routes those packets, grabs a web page (which is a bunch of separate elements), and sends all that back to you.Įach internet request usually results in a whole series of communication events between multiple points. That information is sent back to your browser, which then sends the request again through many computers on the public internet. A separate request is made to a series of name servers to translate the DNS name to an IP address. Once on the public internet, those packets travel through a bunch of computers. If you're in an office, those packets often travel through switches and routers on your LAN before they are transferred to the public internet through a router. To do this, your computer initiates a request by sending some packets. Suppose you're at your desk and you want to access a website like ZDNet. Let's start with the basic idea of internet communication. VPNs are powerful and important tools to protect yourself and your data, but they have limitations. The idea is that everything you send is encapsulated in this private communications channel and encrypted so - even if your packets are intercepted - they can't be deciphered. This leaves any internet user vulnerable to criminals who might steal your banking or credit card information, governments who might want to eavesdrop on their citizens, and other internet users who might want to spy on you for a whole range of nefarious reasons.Ī VPN creates a private tunnel over the open internet.

Many still send their information without any security or privacy protection whatsoever. While some standards have developed, not all internet apps are secure.

The applications you're accustomed to using, whether email, web, messaging, Facebook, etc., are all built on top of that Internet Protocol (IP) core. Most of the internet's core protocols (communication methods) were designed to route around failure rather than secure data. Networking across the country and the world was relatively new, and nodes often went down. When the internet was first designed, the priority was to be able to send packets (chunks of data) as reliably as possible. Here's the problem with the internet: It's inherently insecure. The purpose of a VPN is to provide you with security and privacy as you communicate over the internet. VPN is an acronym for Virtual Private Network.
