VPN cost - A worthwhile expense

VPN provides solution to many problems such as expensive remote access, complex WAN and insecure links to business partners. It saves your money depending upon your operation.

This makes VPN cost an indispensable one and worthwhile expense. In VPN cost capital equipments and on-going administration are the major factors. The service fees and managed equipments are lower. Read more.

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VPN costs
Maintenance
VPN solutions and costs

VPN costs

IP VPN's answers many problems related to expensive remote access, complex WAN's and insecure links to business partners. VPN's save money depending on the size of your operation. A lot of work is presently going on in the Internet Engineering Task Force to bring about interoperability among the various VPN vendors and bring Standards for the industry as a whole. QoS-Quality of Service is another factor that needs to be addressed where key traffic gets higher priority over the public domain. ISP's are working on Service level agreements to provide QoS.

Monthly savings on Service

VPN's costs for communication lines is the ISP's charge a flat monthly rate for many users; this works out cheaper than a direct dial for remote access. Cost reduction can be 50% to 75 % in this area. One example is that of a company Reliant, whose cost after VPN installation (replace T-1 with internet) came down to $2500 from $8000 a month. Many businesses that have changed over to VPN tunnels notice a fall in costs on network services. In the biz market VPN networks is cheaper than WAN. Higher bandwidth for the centralized computer is costly but the most influential pricing factor is the cost on the number of ISP connections fro remote users.

Service Level Guarantees

Service level guarantees from ISP's such as Concentric Network and UUNET to keep your traffic only on their networks avoids unpredictability of the Internet.

Giving a QoS is a technical problem in an encrypted environment as bits marking the QoS cannot be read by routers and hence your priority traffic is the same as email traffic on the network. IPv6 (not yet widely adopted) deals with this problem by adding one more unencrypted header to include QoS information. MPLS-Multi Protocol Label Switching directs traffic through certain sites only thus eliminating the need for encryption. QoS on MPLS is a long way off.

Setup delays costs minimized

Site to site VPN's are fast to set up rather than waiting a month for frame relay circuits to be set up. This gives business an early access of corporate resources through Lotus Notes, email servers or intranet web servers.

Minimizing delay and a guaranteed throughput will make VPN a choice for priority traffic. Set up for large corporate business can be a little problematic as it requires a VPN encryption box at each site. Extranet VPN's to grant certain access to business partners is a bit arduous.

Interoperability

IPSec Schemes require sharing of encryption keys between partners(security concerns make offline sharing advisable). It also requires same equipment at each node. Business partners cannot be influenced in getting the same VPN gear. Dependence on one vendor is not advisable.

Maintenance

Maintenance cost includes Annual hardware and software fees toward a managed VPN. Even if the VPN equipment is bought service contracts patches, upgrades and technical support are overheads that need to be seen. Administrative costs include updating Firewalls, monitoring VPN logs and generating usage reports increases the VPN price. In an estimate give by CISCO for an in house administrator for IPSec VPN is $30 per month per user. For a new user in IPSec, client installation and configuration as well as end user training becomes essential.

Capital Equipment and on-going administration are major factors in VPN costs. Managed equipment and service fees are consistently lower. Pricing reviews and cost can be found at ebay, eweek, extremetech, networkworld etc. yet below are a few products for VPN

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