Photo by Petter Lagson on Unsplash

When you have remote workers, then you understand the need for privacy. The moment they logon to your servers from their location, your information is at risk. This places you in the hands of whatever security measures they have put into place on their system end. Unfortunately, their internal network or firewall does not always do the job. There is always the threat of getting hacked and sensitive information being stolen. You may have heard of Virtual Private Networks, but you are not sure of how to use them or what they are for. What you do know is that you need your assets protected. You need to trust your remote worker to be able to login to your servers safely and securely.

Picture this: your workers log onto your server, and everything they are typing, whether it be on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or another smart device, is traveling along through pipes. These pipes are translucent, and hackers can see every word, number, and file they are sending. For most, all it takes is having one incident of your data and information compromised for the lesson to be learned. This is how vastly open the internet can be, and those who know how can easily access your information.

Internet Service Providers are not doing much to help businesses. They provide service, but beyond the connection, they are on their own to how secure their devices are. There is no efficiency, accountability, knowledge of the path, or how that information is treated by the provider once it leaves your building or returns from your remote worker’s home for that matter.

With your data being carried on a shared network, the doors are wide open for attacking opportunities. With the current expansion of network traffic, Internet Service Providers are pushing what their networks can handle to the edge. There are devices like routers, firewalls, and SD-WAN boxes available for protection, but they can get expensive and do not solve internet performance problems.

What a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, does is it insulates those pipes with a layer of protection, called encryption. When a remote worker logs in through a VPN, your company’s information travels through a tunnel to a remote server then to the remote worker. The benefit of this is twofold. First, it masks the remote workers’ identity through encryption. It also masks their location by sending the information through a remote server.

There is a trade-off with having privacy, and that is latency or speed. This is especially noticed with anything media-oriented, like video conferencing. When you are essentially ‘spoofing’ your location and identity, it takes time for that signal to bounce off where it is going. Making its way from the server and through other internet traffic, called the Internet of Things, just like a freeway, things can get congested. Since a VPN is human-controlled, the only way to repoint it to a faster server is to manually adjust it. So, it is stuck with being outdated, until now.

There are ways a VPN can self-adjust based on internet traffic conditions in real-time. Those adjustments can be so fast that remote workers do not even realize they are happening. It will provide a seamless transition from their location to your servers—all without being reliant on predefined static metrics and human-configured thresholds. This is done through automation.

In addition, today’s market is limited by the network it has access to. The pathway, once it leaves the server, can only go where the ISP allows it to go, and thus can be slowed, especially when a traditional VPN is sending it through specific tunnels. With a wider network, an aVPN® can see roadblocks, anticipate them even, and reroute to a clear path to its destination. An aVPN® thus must rely on a Wide Area Network to have these open doors. And not just any WAN, but the cutting-edge technology of an Artificially Intelligent Wide Area Network (AI-WAN).

Artificially Intelligent Wide Area Network™ encompasses 68 global data centers, and that number only continues to grow. Twenty thousand global nodes are used to collect and analyze internet data. This analysis considers real-time as well as historical information to automatically route data around internet issues such as congestion, latency, and packet loss. AI-WAN® is a patented, artificially intelligent decision-making process. As more data is collected, the more it learns, the better it performs. This ensures an optimal network experience.

An AI-WAN® not only learns about how to get data to its destination faster, it learns how to secure the information it is sending better. With the highest encryption using a Five-Factor security posture, the AI-WAN® Machine Learning AI Security Shield creates unique profiles per device, location, and network. Through learning internet traffic patterns, security issues can be mitigated up to a complete shutdown, if necessary.

This is the first Artificially Intelligent Wide Area Network. The hardware involves a zero-touch device that works as a router, switch, and a firewall wireless access point. It is used with your remote worker’s home network. and the foundation that enables platforms such as an aVPN® to exist. And it reduces the extreme cost of having to purchase or lease dedicated equipment from providers and gives way to a dramatically less pay as you go model. This is the gateway for your remote workers to the internet and the entry point for the Autonomous Virtual Private Network (aVPN®.)

The advancement of everything connected to the internet is growing by the year. In 2017, an estimated 2.33 billion devices were connected to the internet within smart cities. This will amount to $3.5 trillion in the marketplace by 2026, which is five times more than what it is today. This requires infrastructure growth, and it is expected to see a 19.6% growth by 2026. With so many more access points and much more traffic out there, the security of internet traffic comes into question. The need for a fast, reliable, and secure path to your servers for your remote workers will never be more important. And this level of privacy and dependability can be achieved with a GiGstreem Autonomous Virtual Private Network.

When your remote workers need a secure way to conduct business from home, you need the privacy of a Virtual Private Network. To have the added advantage of a VPN that adjusts and strengthens its security as it learns in real-time based on their work patterns, they, and you, need the reliability of a GiGstreem aVPN®. Contact one of our commercial sales representatives with questions about aVPN at 800-747-1830 or email [email protected].

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash