Business continuity is subject to many unexpected events, one of which is the weather. When New York got covered by 9 feet of snow, practically everyone had to stay home until the roads were clear. But the productivity of some businesses was virtually unphased by the tons of snow because they use secure VPN access to log into their corporate network from the comfort of their own home. VPN, meaning virtual private network, lets packets traverse the Internet encrypted so they cannot be read by malicious entities. The end result is that using a VPN is virtually equivalent to plugging your ethernet cable into the wall.

Of course one wouldn’t want to use one-factor authentication on a resource as valuable to attackers as a VPN, so anyone who accesses the VPN should be required to use multiple-factor authentication. Some businesses implement this with SecurID tokens that change numbers in a pseudorandom fashion, others use certificates that require passwords to unlock them, and some businesses also limit access to the VPN so that only certain whitelisted IP addresses can get in. No matter how you configure it, VPN can save your business big bucks by allowing your workers to be productive from home on snow days.