WHAT IS A VPN?

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) creates a private tunnel for a public connection. It allows users to send and receive data using unprotected (shared or public) networks as if their device was connected to the private network. In such way you benefit from the security, reliability and management policies of the private network. VPN establish a virtual point-to-point encrypted connection using dedicated connections, tunnelling protocols and dataencryption standarts.

Using VPN is very similar to a wide area network (WAN). Resources are accessed in the same way as in the private network. In the most cases VPNs are using point-to-point topology and they aren't supposed to support or connect broadcast domains. That's why software and networking based on on OSI layer 2 and broadcast packets, such as NetBIOS which is widely used in Windows networking, may not be fully supported or work not exactly as they are expected on a local area network (LAN). There are kinds of VPN such as Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) and layer 2 tunnelling protocols which are designed to solve such problems

With VPN connection you may allow your employees to securely access a corporate intranet while travelling outside the office. Also it helps big corporations connect their offices all over the world creating one cohesive network. Individual users also may use VPN to secure their WI-FI transaction, ot access geo-restricted content, to circumvent censorship and to connect to proxy servers for the purpose of protecting personal identity and location