What is a Site-to-Site VPN and How it Works?

Maintaining the confidentiality of your data has become a crucial task nowadays and corporates know its importance well.

Each year, thousands of cyber threats are made to small and medium businesses which poses a danger to their business secrets.

Individuals can maintain their privacy by using a VPN but have you thought about how businesses would do this? The answer is a 'Site-to-Site VPN'.

In this guide, we'll go through an extensive detail of Site-to-Site VPNs and how you can use them for your business or agency.

The Meaning of Site-to-Site VPN

A Site-to-Site VPN is a private VPN network that is made only for some specific locations and communicating with each other within a framework.

It is highly different from a normal VPN that individuals use for accessing the internet. A Site-to-Site VPN is only made for communication and data-sharing purposes.

Such kinds of VPNs are highly useful for small and medium businesses as well as corporations.

How Site-to-Site VPNs Work?

A Site-to-Site VPN works between different branches or offices of a company. It is a connection made between LANs of offices that are situated in different locations.

By this method, a secure connection is made between these branches of a specific company. 

So the employees can now communicate and share data without caring for any kind of cyber threats.

The VPN that common people use for surfing on the web, is called a Remote-access VPN and is highly different from a Site-to-Site VPN.

A company needs many physical devices such as gateways, routers, hubs, LANs, etc. to make a Site-to-Site VPN. For this reason, you will not find Site-to-Site VPN providers as easily as you can get Remote-Access VPNs.

How Site-to-Site VPNs Can be Advantageous for a Company:

As we have already mentioned in the intro itself, maintaining confidentiality is one of the crucial tasks for a business or corporate no matter how big their size is.

From that perspective, using a Site-to-Site VPN can provide an extra edge to a business. Some of its benefits are given below:

A Layer of Safety for Confidential Data

No company would ever want somebody to leak their business data or trade secrets. The most basic benefit of a Site-to-Site VPN is that it adds a layer of security to the data.

Without a VPN or Encryption, any hacker can easily peek through the database and steal all the information to use it for his purposes.

File Sharing and Accessing Data becomes easier

As the VPN forms a connectivity tunnel between different branches of a corporation, it becomes easier for the employees to access and share data with others.

So for example, if an employee is working in Branch X then he can easily access the database of another Branch Y of that same company without physically going there.

Business Workflow becomes Smoother

While this is not a direct benefit of a Site-to-Site VPN, it is the byproduct of the above-mentioned features.

Business owners can work easily without having to worry about the security of the company's data. Employees can easily share the files just from the dashboard of their workstation itself.

Downsides of a Site-to-Site VPN

While these were the benefits of a Site-to-Site VPN, in today's time there are more downsides compared to the benefits of using a Site-to-Site VPN.

Site-to-site VPNs are much more outdated than you think. Their history is as long as the history of the internet itself.

Today Site-to-Site VPNs have almost become non-existent in the market and instead, better alternatives have taken their place.

We have listed some downsides of Site-to-Site VPNs to provide you with the whole picture of these VPNs.

Site-to-Site VPNs are not Suitable for Work from Home

Site-to-site VPNs require a connection of various devices such as gateways, routers, servers, etc.

Now this requires a physical location. As we have seen in recent years more and more businesses are going towards hiring remotely-working employees. Hence these VPNs couldn't be used for Work-from-Home employees.

Data Security is not much Voracious

While Site-to-Site VPNs are primarily set up for this reason still, these VPNs can't provide a high level of security. You can call it an irony.

In today's era, especially when cyber attacks have become next-level and hackers have found new ways of conducting threats, Site-to-Site VPNs perform to be slow in terms of security.

Conclusion

Whether your business uses a Site-to-Site VPN or not, one thing is crucial for sure. That is maintaining the security of your company's confidential information.

Site-to-site VPNs have become old and poorly efficient. Their biggest and best alternative in today's era is Cloud Services.

Cloud Services provide a lot of leads and efficiency to the business while being less cost expensive and easy to maintain.