VPN for your VPS, with OpenVPN

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More and more, security and cost are becoming greater concerns for network connections. Any data damaged or stolen by network hacking can be detrimental to any private or public organization, resulting in dire financial consequences, so good security is a must. But at the same time, any organization has to keep an eye on its bottom line to make sure that its information infrastructure costs remain low.

One method of achieving relatively high security with low cost for network connectivity is a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN acts like a high cost, high security leased line would. How it works though, is that it encrypts data transfers over the connection, so that it mitigates security threats, while making it possible to use inexpensive network connections. Thus VPNs are a good tool for addressing the matter of high security and low cost. VPNs can be either hardware or software.

Typically, software VPNs can be even less costly than their hardware counterparts, and in some cases they can even be free. One example of VPN software is OpenVPN. OpenVPN is not only free to use, but also open source, meaning that the software can be modified for internal use within your organization. Specifically, the open source model for OpenVPN is the GNU General Public License (GPL). Other software VPNs are Cisco VPN Client and Hamachi.

Since OpenVPN is run in software, costs can be further lowered by running OpenVPN on a virtual private server (VPS) on pretty much any off the shelf computer. A VPS is much like a VPN, only it virtualizes one computer within another whereas the VPN makes a virtual, secure connection over a regular connection. In addition, an OpenVPN VPS can also be highly secure as the VPN VPS is run in isolation from other processes running within the host. With a powerful enough host, many individual VPN VPS machines and their connections can be run at the same time. So in this manner, an OpenVPN VPS can be quite handy to any network-connected organization due to further combining of high-security and low cost.

OpeVPN will work in a variety of operating systems, from Mac OS, to Linux, to various flavors of Microsoft Windows (2000/XP/Vista/7). Hardware-wise, OpenVPN isn’t very demanding, with even old hardware (such as a Pentium 2 at 266Mhz) achieving high throughput. But as noted before, the faster the host, the more VPN VPS’ can be run on that same host. Surprisingly, OpenVPN VPS’ are secure, free, and modifiable.