In an effort to further secure the networks of remote employees working from home, Netgear has announced a new business VPN service that's compatible with its existing mesh router systems.
The networking company's new Insight Business VPN is an add-on service available for its Orbi Pro Series of Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 business mesh routers. With this new service SMBs will be able to extend their corporate networks to branch offices and even the home offices of employees while ensuring that each node on the network is secured and centrally managed.
The Wi-Fi work network in an employee's home is preconfigured as a separate VLAN for Netgear's corporate VPN and runs separately from their home network which is on another isolated VLAN. By using the same SSID at an organization's headquarters and at remote sites, Insight Business VPN provides an easy-to-use and secure end-user environment while also eliminating administrative complexity for IT teams.
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Senior product line manager at Netgear, Douglas Cheung provided further insight on the company's new Insight Business VPN add-on service in a press release, saying:
“In the big shift to work-from-home, we’ve seen many challenges for the remote workforce, including security concerns and declining employee productivity levels due to unreliable access to company applications and networked systems, and storage. NETGEAR Insight Business VPN tackles these concerns with a secured and persistent connection, running on Orbi Pro, a high performance business WiFi mesh system, all the while providing an seamless experience equivalent to that of working at the headquarters.”
Insight Business VPN
To get started using Netgear's Insight Business VPN, an admin will first need to configure the business VPN on the headquarter Orbi Pro unit and the remote units before sending them out to employees.
The Orbi Pro units at remote and home sites connect employees to their headquarters using the same corporate SSID once powered on. The connection they provide is encrypted and persistent and requires no repeated authentication while providing the equivalent level of security if an employee was working at the office.
Existing users of Netgear's SXK80 and SRK60 Orbi Pro systems can enable Insight Business VPN by downloading the latest firmware version. Administering VPN access at a group or department level, managing VPN access for remote employees or branch office locations and receiving reports as well as notifications on VPN performance is then done using an administrator web GUI.
Netgear Insight Business VPN is available to purchase worldwide through the Netgear Insight Cloud Portal and authorized resellers. Pricing starts at $160 per year for five concurrent VPN enabled client devices and this goes up to $2,000 per year for 250 devices.
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