3 Reasons Why Small Businesses Need VPN to Secure Their Workflow

In this article, we are going to explain why businesses need VPN to facilitate their workflows.

Most small businesses think that investing in enhanced security measures is more of an extra than a necessity, as they want to use that money for the growth of their business. But, cybersecurity spending is important for securing your business’ growth.

Introduction to VPNs and Why Businesses Need Them

Today, there are really advanced security architectures that seamlessly can be integrated into your existing infrastructure. SMBs must have some enhanced security tools for facilitating the remote workforce, and workflow.   

SMBs often are mistaken by thinking cybercriminals won’t be interested in attacking their company because they have 50 to 100 employees and few branch offices. Don’t be mistaken by this. Cyber-attacks have severe consequences such as financial and reputational losses.

More than half of cyber attacks occur in small to mid-size businesses, and 60% of these businesses go out of business within six months because of data breaches, and sensitive data theft.

Small businesses must be more aware of cyber threats and take measures before they become a victim of cyberattacks. SMBs are vulnerable targets for cybercriminals.

Even if your company has limited resources, investing in a small business VPN is an excellent cyber security plan that will keep your company network safe from both internal and external threats.

Business VPNs can seamlessly be deployed within hours. Small business VPNs often go to security plans for SMBs, and they are certainly much cheaper than data breach and recovery costs. Before listing a few reasons why small businesses need VPNs, let’s explain what is a VPN and how it works.

What Is a VPN and How It Works?

Virtual Private Network technology is designed to hide your online presence from the public internet, and protect your data transfers by encrypting all of your network traffic. End-to-end encryption makes your data transfers indecipherable to unauthorized people.

When you use VPN services and connect to a VPN server of your choice and it gives you an IP address and hides your real location.

What Is Business VPN?

A business VPN uses the same functions as VPN technology, it hides and encrypts a business’s internal traffic from the public internet. When employees request access to corporate resources, VPN creates a private tunnel for them to access corporate resources.

In short, it provides secure access to employees and protects corporate resources from malicious actors. It ensures secure workflow, and VPN gateways are critical for the authentication of users that access resources.

A business VPN is easy to integrate into businesses' existing infrastructures as it doesn’t require hardware. It usually has a user-end configuration setup, but if you want to connect your branch offices' networks into a shared LAN ecosystem, you can choose Site-to-Site VPN.

But, Site-to-Site connections often require an on-premise setup to perform well, and it is more costly than software-based business VPNs.

In these setups, businesses can manage team permissions from control panels, and they can add or remove employees from the network anytime they want. Additionally, these VPNs enable secure remote access.

As for extras like IP whitelisting, and authentication. These features are compatible with these VPNs. Lastly, VPNs ensure only employees and authorized users can connect to the corporate network from whitelist IP addresses.

Why do Small Businesses Need VPNs?

A business VPN is a critical component for your cyber security posture as it enables privacy and anonymity of your network traffic. Let’s see the top 3 reasons why do small businesses need it.

Increasing Risk of Cyber Threats

Today, cybercriminals are using very sophisticated methods and techniques to accomplish their malicious goals. They constantly improve their skills and tactics directly proportional to modern-day security approaches.

The anonymity of your traffic is more important than ever. Additionally, these malicious actors are well aware that small companies often don’t have enhanced security measures, so a lack of security makes their jobs easier.

In today’s world, small businesses should acknowledge that with poor security measures they are up against cyber threats all the time, and these attacks are more likely to be successful. So, integrating a business VPN will prevent unwanted access to your corporate network while securing the workflow on a daily basis.

Remote Workers Increases Security Risks

In the pre-pandemic years, only a minority of employees worked remotely.

But with the pandemic, the number of remote employees increased rapidly. Today, many employees desire solely remote or hybrid working models, and perimeter-based security measures aren’t compatible and effective to keep the corporate network safe.

The remote employees don't always work from their homes, sometimes they work in public places such as coffee shops, libraries, restaurants, or airports.

While working in these places, they use unsecured public Wifi to answer emails, do their daily jobs, share files, etc. and these networks make cyber criminals' jobs way much easier because they can track, and monitor everything that your employees are doing.

But, when employees use a VPN, their activities can’t be tracked or monitored even if they use an unsecured network. In short, a business VPN enables secure access to employees at all times and mitigates the risks of data loss during transfers.

A VPN Is Cheaper Than Single Data Breach

The cost of a single breach is more expensive than you think. In fact, the average recovery cost of a single data breach is between $36,000 to $50,000 for small businesses. This amount of money can cause small companies to go out of business as they already have limited resources and can’t afford the cost.

Instead of falling victim to data breaches, small companies can invest in a good VPN and prevent potential and existing threats. For small businesses, VPNs can really secure the workflow, and they are very affordable and much cheaper than a single data breach.

Last Words

As of 2022, cyber crimes are increasing drastically, and these criminals are targeting small businesses more. In most cases, small businesses can’t cover the cost of data breaches. Even if they have limited resources, they should invest in a good VPN that provides enhanced security.