Nearly VPNs
Depending on your needs, a classical VPN might not be the only, or best, solution. One alternative is remote desktop access, via services such as GoToMyPC, TeamViewer and LogMeIn. These products appeal to managers who fear the complexity and costs of a full VPN, and they tick the key boxes: the traffic between the controller and the controlled PC is encrypted, and you can normally connect from anywhere.
But if you want to take this route, there are some significant issues to consider. Offering a convenient gateway for users to connect to a machine inside your company’s firewall necessarily means opening up the same opportunity to unscrupulous hackers. Some businesses address this by sending their remote-control traffic over their VPN, just to make you think about that combination. What’s more, while the costs may seem low at first, the licensing structure can quickly become restrictive and expensive. Some of the productsupport remote-control apps come in at £1,500 per year per starting licence, which may quickly turn you back onto more traditional VPN solutions.
Another idea that could, in theory,
replace a conventional VPN service is taking advantage of IPv6 to open a secure connection directly to any internet-accessible device. I’ve seen Microsoft staff do this in meetings: if they’ve left a relevant file on their desktop PC back in Redmond, they simply pop open an IPv6 Teredo tunnel, from wherever in the world they happen to be at the time, and grab it.
This shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation, however, not least because I honestly have no idea what sort of defences Microsoft has at the edges of its IPv6 network. I suspect that its security resources are formidable indeed, and the number of companies who can match them is evidently small, because I seldom see anyone else even trying to dip a toe in the water.
Indeed, although IPv6 was originally envisaged as a general-purpose transport for connecting any two devices in the universe, there’s a whole range of alternatives out there, including completely private protocols, such as those underpinning Amazon’s services. Rather than becoming the universal transport, IPv6 may end up being an ancestor of the eventual winner – which isn’t at all clear right now, and may not even exist yet.