Why Use VPN

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and the tool serves to protect your communications as if you were on our internal network (and all the protections it provides).    

If you are doing anything out on any public network with your computer, it is relatively easy for anyone else to tap-in and see everything you're doing, including capturing your passwords, watching your screen and so on.   All of your actions get recorded in logs of various machines along the way and you won't know how that data might be used.

By connecting to the board's VPN service, all of your activity gets put through a secure tunnel, that other systems cannot see into, so your activity only gets exposed to the open again once it's inside our network. 

 

Using the board's VPN service is only essential when accessing our internal network drives or systems.  Since all traffic would flow through the board office while connected, it does slow down if very many people are using it at the same time.    We do have newer firewalls on the way which will expand this capacity.

Many companies sell VPN services, those are also good for the same purpose on public networks but they don't connect you to our internal network.  But they do help protect your computer/device in public spaces.

 

Https://   (notice the S)   is another method of encrypting and protecting information going to/from a particular website.  The start of any website address needs to have this in place, such as any connections to Google or Microsoft or other resources you log into.  This only protects what's inside the connection to that site, it doesn't hide what sites you're going to...so it works hand in hand with VPN.