What to Expect from VPNs in 2020?

[jomic]

While reading infosecurity mag, i noticed a person mentioned that VPNs will expand in terms of user base and market size, due to their support for all devices, platforms, and services at the same time. Over time, individual users as well as organizations have realized that VPNs are one such tool which gave a complete cyber security solution.

Can we expect this much from encryption technologies?

 

[RMerlin]

Some medias seem to think that VPNs are something totally new and revolutionary. They're not. VPNs have been extensively used in enterprises for close to 15 years now, as more people started working remotely, and products like PCAnywhere and CloseUp started to show their limitation.

Medias are often confusing VPN (the technology) with the tunnels sold by various providers. They should NOT be mixed up. The goal of a VPN is, as the name implies, to establish a Virtual Private Network between two locations, across an insecure network (the Internet). It's intended use is to remotely connect two offices over the Internet, or a remote worker with an office. The office has extended a bit to also become homes, so users can remotely access their media collection back at home (for example).

The service the VPN tunnel providers are selling are just a by-product of the technology, which was NOT designed to that purpose (hiding your public IP by replacing it with that of someone else's network). People using these services should start questioning the implementation done by their provider, because a badly configured tunnel will severely put their home network at risk. Remember when I said the initial goal of a VPN is to connect two networks together? Part of what it does is bypass firewalls. This means your tunnel provider is bypassing YOUR firewall. How secure is the provider's own firewall (assuming they DO have one in front of their end of the tunnel)? That's one question not enough customers ever considered.

 

[sfx2000]

While reading infosecurity mag, i noticed a person mentioned that VPNs will expand in terms of user base and market size, due to their support for all devices, platforms, and services at the same time. Over time, individual users as well as organizations have realized that VPNs are one such tool which gave a complete cyber security solution.

Can we expect this much from encryption technologies?

I think at some point - VPN's might be useless for purposes that most folks do now - which is geo-unlock content... and that isn't going to last for much longer...

With IPv6 - implementing overlays with service and content providers is going to be the key point, and residential gateways will be the edge servers there...

Software Defined Networking and Network Virtualization - the days of user owned gateways will be a bit quaint...

 

[jomic]

Some medias seem to think that VPNs are something totally new and revolutionary. They're not. VPNs have been extensively used in enterprises for close to 15 years now, as more people started working remotely, and products like PCAnywhere and CloseUp started to show their limitation.

Medias are often confusing VPN (the technology) with the tunnels sold by various providers. They should NOT be mixed up. The goal of a VPN is, as the name implies, to establish a Virtual Private Network between two locations, across an insecure network (the Internet). It's intended use is to remotely connect two offices over the Internet, or a remote worker with an office. The office has extended a bit to also become homes, so users can remotely access their media collection back at home (for example).

The service the VPN tunnel providers are selling are just a by-product of the technology, which was NOT designed to that purpose (hiding your public IP by replacing it with that of someone else's network). People using these services should start questioning the implementation done by their provider, because a badly configured tunnel will severely put their home network at risk. Remember when I said the initial goal of a VPN is to connect two networks together? Part of what it does is bypass firewalls. This means your tunnel provider is bypassing YOUR firewall. How secure is the provider's own firewall (assuming they DO have one in front of their end of the tunnel)? That's one question not enough customers ever considered.

Sadly, most people dont know the technicalities behind these encryption technologies.

 

[jomic]

I think at some point - VPN's might be useless for purposes that most folks do now - which is geo-unlock content... and that isn't going to last for much longer...

With IPv6 - implementing overlays with service and content providers is going to be the key point, and residential gateways will be the edge servers there...

Software Defined Networking and Network Virtualization - the days of user owned gateways will be a bit quaint...

I tihnk, it's a strong use case of VPN when people get it for geo-unlock content. almost 70% americans use VPNs to unblock restricted websites.