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Evaluating the costs associated with securing, supporting and maintaining a VPN

What are the associated costs regarding the performance, security, support and maintenance of a VPN?

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That's a tough question! It's difficult to predict the cost of maintaining a VPN without a solid understanding of your proposed architecture and the existing IT infrastructure. The hard costs of implementing a VPN lie in the endpoint device(s) that you choose. A dedicated VPN endpoint with hardware-based encryption will cost significantly more than a software-based approach using existing hardware. You also must consider the indirect costs of maintaining the VPN over time. You'll need to provide routine maintenance, user training and support, along with proactive monitoring. If your organization already has a network engineering group,help desk and log monitoring infrastructure, these may be simple incremental additions. On the other hand, you may need to hire individuals to fill these roles and provide them with organization-specific training.

The only way you can arrive at a true estimate of the costs is to sit down with those responsible for maintaining your infrastructure and those who are familiar with the cost of providing IT service in your organization and walk through each of the detailed elements of implementing and maintaining your VPN.

For More Information

  • Learn how VPNs can help block and secure untrusted endpoints, in our Network Access Control Learning Guide.
  • Discovered who received honors for their remote access solutions.

    • This was first published in June 2006

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