In essence, VPNs create what is known as a virtual private network, where the end users are connected through an encrypted channel. It’s something that is popular today with both corporate and home users as brings great benefits to our interconnected world with all its challenges in terms of both privacy and security.
VPNs provide businesses and particularly freelancers a smorgasbord of unique advantages, including privacy protection, improved security, better connectivity and access to restricted sources.
Security.
This is something that remains a major challenge for the highly interconnected world today. As a freelancer you need your laptop or phone connected to the world as a part of the gig economy However, as soon as your mobile phone and your PC is connected to the internet, you are open to a wealth of malicious programs, hackers, viruses and a number of unknown threats that pop up each day. Additionally, any of the information that you send and receive can be intercepted, viewed or even altered in some way.
There are options for freelancers and small businesses in terms of local security solutions such as a firewall or antivirus, but they are not going to be enough to completely defend you alone. It is important that you have a completely separate external solution for the protection of your communication with the outside world.
This is where VPN comes in. A VPN will protect any connection that is otherwise insecure between you and any remote resource. VPNs are ideal and should be used if you are going to be on a public network or Wi-Fi. As a general rule, you should not consider any network as secure as there is always communication flowing through a variety of points (or routers), and an attacker could hypothetically compromise any of the points to get into the channel and the information flow.
If a communication channel ends up compromised and you are using a VPN alongside other means, you either will not be harmed, or the harm will only be minimal. This is because a VPN connection is encrypted and you cannot decrypt it or read it. Whenever an attacker tries to get into VPN traffic, they will only be able to see incomprehensible characters that are going from you out into the VPN server. The attacker will not be able to see whatever remote source you may be connected to, such as chats, sites, etc. Being up to date with this list of 2017 best VPN services will help you get the best VPN and value for your money.
Privacy Protection.
Reality is, privacy is a serious challenge and you can be identified easily when you are online. Anyone from an aggressive marketing companies and curious people, to government officials can easily find your name and your location and address with very little difficulty and you may not know you’ve left that information. Once you are connected online with your mobile phone or PC, you may not realise it but you leave traces and information. It’s easy for a third party to determine your internet service provider and your IP address. This will often reveal your essential personal information. In order to protect yourself from this, you cannot rely solely on internet service providers or official regulations.
To protect your privacy, you should be using VPN. With a VPN, whenever you go to websites, chat, listen to the radio and more, you will be identified with your VPN provider at their address and location. Essentially all of your personal details and your own IP address will remain hidden.
When you use a VPN for privacy protection, you will be safe from frequent abuse of your personal information. A VPN is a must for someone who wants to disclose their identity.
While there are other solutions such web proxies that will protect identity, they are simply not quite as efficient as the latest VPN technology. For example, proxies will often send out information on the original IP for a client, making them useless when it comes to privacy protection.
Restricted Resource Access.
TVs and online radios will sometimes restrict access to only the clients who are within a certain area or internet service provider. There are other times when the policies of a company will prevent the employees from connecting with anything but the generally available sites or other resources like Facebook. These restrictions will leave you with no other options but to use VPN.
VPNs also have multiple points of presence over different geographical regions. You will be identified only with your VPN provider, allowing you to circumvent any of the geographical restrictions. Because of this VPNs are very popular in countries like China where there could be heavily restricted access to resources and sites. In these countries, you can access anything online just as long as you have a VPN connection.
A VPN will also work the other way around, when it comes to access restrictions. You may want to limit the access to some private resources like file sharing only for a certain network segment. This will be important from a security standpoint as the authentication will rarely be enough to protect the security of your sensitive information.
The VPNs can be used and you can allow the VPN network the connection it needs to the private sensitive resources.
Better Connectivity.
Your internet routes may not be optimal, or the bandwidth may be limited when it comes to international online resources. This will lead to a poor web experience and slower browsing for some resources that are distant from physical location. In this case, you cannot connect to a local VPN that will further route traffic. This allows you to have bandwidth to distant destinations that are similar to bandwidth that is available between you and the local VPN server.
This better connectivity can be observed in users who have ISPs that differentiate the local and international resources. Such providers will enforce bandwidth limits on the access to international resources and you can avoid them by using only VPN.
Other Benefits.
The VPNs also have different benefits that will depend on the VPN service provider that you are using. Some of the VPN providers allow users to share easily and much quicker between themselves, perform activities and play games just as if they were within a LAN, or local area network.
Another benefit may include what is known as port forwarding. This means, if you have a resource like an IP camera, web server, etc., you wish to access remotely or share to the world, you can use the VPN for this purpose. This will be useful if you have a resource that is located inside any local network and has an IP address that is internal. In these cases, this resource can be configured so that it connects to the VPN, thus receiving an external IP where it can be accessed.
The Top Benefits.
If you find the aforementioned to be attractive, you have two choices. You can install a VPN server alone, or you can subscribe to the VPN service provider. Many of the benefits are determined by the particular VPN service provider you use.
Most VPNs are easy to set up and if any of the above rings a bell with you, then I’d suggest taking a closer look at VPNs.
