Many organisations with a large commitment to remote access are turning to alternatives such as packaged virtual private network (VPN) business solutions to support their remote access needs. These packaged VPN solutions offer several distinct cost, performance and security advantages.

In a VPN, resources on one network connect to another network by "tunneling" through a public network such as the Internet, providing remote users with many of the same features available in private networks. For remote users, the details of the intermediate "cloud" are irrelevant; as far as they are concerned the VPN is a private, dedicated point-to-point connection between their desktop and the corporate network.

Since packaged VPN solutions cater to the business user, they also typically offer better performance than standard service providers because businesses aren't competing with individual users for valuable bandwidth. And because VPNs employ encryption technologies as part of the data transfer process, they offer greater security than traditional dial-up solutions.