Employees on business trips need to stay current with their electronic mail. Sales representatives in the field must be able to access corporate databases. Branch offices must be part of the corporate network. Telecommuting workers, including those just working after hours and weekends from home, have to transfer files and open applications. These are just some of the everyday forces that are driving the ever greater demand for remote access to a company's computer network.
For network administrators, the need to provide remote access has been a double challenge. There is the high cost of supportive infrastructure with modem pools and dedicated phone lines (or expensive long-distance costs), along with the threat to a network's security that can result if unauthorized users gained entry.
Paralleling the rising demand for remote access has been the need to provide workers with Internet connectivity, often causing duplicate connectivity investments and soaring costs. Although the Internet provides a natural, and inexpensive path for linking remote users, security concerns have made network administrators reluctant to open their systems to remote access via the Internet.
Microsoft Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology, is specifically designed to solve the problem of providing secure and economical remote access. Based upon the open-standard Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), VPN allows corporations and individuals to take advantage of the vast Internet infrastructure (or other public carriers) to provide secure connectivity between remote clients and private networks. Remote users just dial into the local number of an Internet service provider, and securely tunnel into their corporate network.
Additionally, PPTP can be used with dense and integrated communications solutions to support V.34 and ISDN dial-up. And corporations can use a PPTP-enabled VPN over IP backbones to outsource dial-up access to their corporate networks in a manner that is cost-effective, hassle-free, protocol-independent, secure, and that requires no changes to their existing network addressing.
Microsoft is working with the PPTP Forum to support PPTP as an open industry standard. This group of leading companies includes Ascend Communications, 3Com/Primary Access, ECI/Telematics, and US Robotics. PPTP is also attracting extensive third-party support.