As companies become increasingly reliant on new distributed applications
they discover a number of factors that challenge their expectations.
Cost-effectiveness heavily influences
the return on investment of your VPN project. But hidden costs in
downtime, loss of productivity, security breaches, customer satisfaction
and confidence can create huge business losses. You must know what
your
current
operating costs are, have clear expectations on just how much
a VPN will cost to implement, and understand the impacts of cost
trade-offs against the various technology options.
Interoperability can present
many unforeseen pitfalls. Vendors have implemented different tunnelling,
encryption and authentication protocols, while problems can occur
between public and private IP addressing schemes. Making sure and
testing
that the routers, firewalls, IPSec gateways and certificate authorities
all work together can be a challenging experience.
QoS problems vary depending
on the degree of control you have over resource allocation and traffic
prioritisation. The challenge is to ensure applications have sufficient
response times and service levels to meet their performance criteria
or importance to the business. QoS must be designed in, monitored
and validated via service level guarantees set in
SLAs.
Security concerns have increased
as mission-critical traffic migrates to IP networks. This data needs
to be kept confidential, secure and protected to avoid breaches,
theft, viruses and attacks.
Securing
the network perimeter requires careful attention along with security
features such as firewalls, IDS, virus scanning and strong encryption.
Client management of VPN performance
is a significant challenge for network administrators. A customer
network management service like
Net
Perspective is a must to gain visibility across your VPN domain
and to monitor availability, integrity, faults and performance statistics.