“Following the rise in a number of emerging trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things, we can now expect virtual private networks to become ubiquitous.
While years ago, VPNs were exclusively used by big companies and government authorities, today a large pool of individuals and businesses of all sizes are seeing the benefits of it.
VPNs were initially created to provide remote access to network resources. From there, the VPN industry is now undergoing a shift in its focus to make privacy a core focus.
As we are expecting to see new encryptions incorporated, VPN technologies coming to market in the next five years are likely to become more and more privacy-focused.
Once these improvements are incorporated, such as anonymous tokenized authentication and protocol obfuscation, we can expect a significant change in how online privacy is being reinforced.
It is easy to imagine a prosperous future for the VPN industry as the technology has the potential to bolster internet security from a number of threats.
That said, we must keep in mind that while VPNs are likely to become as widespread in the next few years as firewalls are today, they cannot eradicate cyber threats and ensure absolute privacy.
The need for VPN will continue to grow however, and they are on the path to becoming omnipresent in the business environment.”
Future of privacy
“Speaking about the future of VPN, we should first think about the future of privacy. It is obvious that not much privacy left in today's world. We see many examples of Geo restricted countries.
The best example, is of course, The Great China Firewall and Trump’s resolution to let ISPs share private data. Such innovations call other countries to go the same way. In the next 10 - 15 years VPN will become more of a platitude than today.
VPN will continue to advocate the right of privacy and people will use VPN hoping for salvation.
It will increase the number of VPN providers and competition on VPN market will continue to grow. In today's world, one of the main problems is that each device in one way or another collect data for different purposes.
Services for communication such as Skype, WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook, also mean the transfer of data to a third party and of course people are not comfortable with that.
Our personal data is our intellectual property and we are interested in reducing all possible risks of leakage.
At the moment the truth is that most internet users are technically unsafe. VPN industry is trying to change it making use of VPN affordable and easy for everyone. In the future, there will be no need for users to setup VPN on their devices as it will be built in OS and automatized.
No doubts that the future of VPN looks promising and It will keep fighting for the internet with no restrictions and right for privacy.
There are actually two possible scenarios in the nearest future. The first one is the world where we completely forget about the word privacy. And the second one is continue standing up for our right of privacy and net neutrality. “
- James Longworth is the Solution Architect Manager at Insight UK
- Aleksei Malyshev is the Director at Privatoria
