If you spend any amount of time on YouTube, chances are you’ve seen videos bring up the names of various sponsors, including consumer VPNs. VPN providers take advantage of the trendiness of these influencers to spread awareness of their products. We want to make one thing abundantly clear: the consumer VPNs offered by these sponsors are not the kind of VPN your business should be using.
Let’s take a moment to look at how VPNs work, and why they are absolutely not all the same, especially for business purposes.
A VPN is supposed to hide the IP addresses you access as a network. In essence, it creates a virtual network that helps to keep things private for the user. The issue here is that many of the reasons why influencers highlight these VPNs are simply meaningless, particularly when you compare the needs of the average user to the needs of your business.
The big issue at hand here is the intended use of the solution. Commercial VPNs allow you to access a random network anonymously, but a business VPN will provide your team with access to your specific network. The commercial VPN is doing something much different from what you need your business VPN to do.
The big selling point highlighted by influencers is being able to access the Internet through unsecured networks more safely. However, these VPNs are often pushed as solutions that can solve the majority of individual security issues, which is not really the case in the first place, and certainly not for businesses.
Furthermore, there are plenty of other reasons why you shouldn’t trust a personal-use VPN the way you would trust one designed for businesses. Multiple users can use a business-grade VPN at the same time, whereas a consumer-grade one is meant for single users. A business grade VPN is intended to be used by multiple users who can securely access resources stored on your company’s infrastructure, which is not what the consumer-grade VPN is designed for.
The right tools for the job can go a long way toward making your business endeavors more manageable. To learn more about how you can secure your network with an adequate VPN, reach out to First Column IT at (571) 470-5594.
