How to Choose the Best VPN Service? Types of VPNs and Their Uses for Business and Personal Use

What is a VPN and what is it used for? The growing popularity of remote work has also led to a surge in interest in services that enhance security and facilitate access to company resources outside the office or corporate headquarters. One of these is, of course, a VPN, or Virtual Private Network. The business services market offers a range of such solutions, including...

What is a VPN and what is it used for?

The growing popularity of remote work has also led to a surge in interest in services that enhance security and facilitate access to company resources from outside the office or corporate headquarters. One of these is, of course, a VPN, or Virtual Private Network. The business services market offers a number of such solutions, including products from companies such as Fortinet, Cisco, CheckPoint, and PaloAlto. Simply put, they involve encrypting all network traffic between an employee's computer and the company's IT infrastructure. Implementing such a solution, however, is quite expensive and requires the assistance of IT specialists or an in-house IT support department.

For this reason, commercial solutions aimed at home users, such as ProtonVPN, NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and PrivateInternetAccess, are also very popular. They operate in a similar manner, are simpler to configure, but have slightly different assumptions. While the former requires a device located in the company or company server room to operate the VPN, here all you need is a program downloaded from the internet – a client – ​​that provides connection to the service provider's network, through which the user's network traffic is transmitted. Configuration takes literally minutes, and installation is no different than any other program.

Figure 1 - ProtonVPN app appearance

What are the differences between commercial and business services?

The primary difference between the two solutions is their application. As mentioned in the first paragraph, business-specific solutions primarily offer the ability to securely connect to the corporate network. They provide encrypted connectivity to corporate resources, which increases security, and enable remote access to shared computers, terminals, network drives, and servers, among other things, without having to be in the office. In simple terms, it looks like the image below:

Figure 2 - Corporate network connection diagram using Fortigate as an example

Advantages include high configurability and customization. They allow internal IT departments to filter user network traffic and protect the corporate network from threats, block access to websites deemed potentially dangerous, and often also feature an integrated antivirus engine. They also allow for user access management, ensuring that, for example, the accounting department won't have unrestricted access to project team documentation and files, and vice versa.

Solutions for home users are designed for completely different purposes. Of course, a common feature is the provision of an encrypted connection, but in this case, it connects not to the corporate network but to a service provider's server located elsewhere in the world, which we can often choose ourselves. They are not used to access private networks or network resources shared elsewhere, so their use at work is negligible. However, it can be useful for changing the user's physical location. By connecting to a server located in the US, many websites will assume you're actually located there, which can provide numerous benefits, such as:

- accessing geo-restricted content on streaming services like Netflix, HBO, and Amazon

- protecting against network traffic eavesdropping

- filtering and blocking access to unsafe addresses

A VPN can also be useful when traveling frequently and needing to use public Wi-Fi networks. In such situations, an encrypted connection can significantly increase security, without the worry of being eavesdropped on.

How to choose the best VPN? What should you look for when choosing a specific service provider?

First, you should consider several factors. First, it's worth checking the provider's business profile and whether they collect user data and sell it to third parties. Many VPN companies often declare a no-logs policy, but unfortunately, determining whether this is true is very difficult, as only the companies hired to conduct the audit have access to the infrastructure. Of course, the connection between the client and the server is still encrypted, but the service provider in this situation replaces the connection provider and intercepts all user network traffic, allowing them to track their online activity because they can still see who is connecting and to which server. Only the company conducting the audit can assess whether the implementation of specific protocols and security measures was carried out correctly, so when relying on their opinion, it's worth considering their reputation and reliability in previous projects. It's also worth noting that the internet provider has the same network traffic monitoring capabilities. However, while Orange, UPC, and other large companies are obligated to protect their customers' data under national and European law (such as the General Data Protection Regulation), this isn't the case for a company based outside the EU and operating in a country where data protection may be much more liberal.

Therefore, when looking for reliable information, it's worth relying on independent sources. A website where you can find comparisons of specific solutions is, for example, privacytools.io. It features detailed descriptions of various services, presented in a very accessible way, so even a non-expert can understand most of the terms used. It's also important to distinguish between sponsored comments, articles (or even websites) and those that objectively evaluate a given solution. The most important thing is to find out who owns the VPN services and then analyze their most popular rankings. In our professional practice, we have often encountered situations where the same company owned several different solutions, which were then promoted on websites belonging to the same organization. This fact is a warning sign that cannot be ignored.

Summary – Is a VPN Really Necessary?

When choosing a specific VPN service, we should ask ourselves whether we really need it. Its growing popularity has also led to many misunderstandings and half-truths about its necessity. Many people often confuse corporate services with commercial ones, believing they should also use them on their personal computers. Many websites, such as banking portals, online stores, and even search engines like Google, offer connections using secure internet protocols such as HTTPS, SSL, or SSH, so the connection is already encrypted by default. In such a situation, even if we fear that our internet provider is actually eavesdropping, they will only see that we connected to the bank's website – everything else within the session will be invisible to them, only knowing when and how much time we spent making transfers.

It's also worth mentioning the very common practice of presenting the need for a VPN in almost every situation, scaring users about the "danger," when in practice, the service is completely unnecessary. For example, when launching one of the most popular VPN services, the first thing we notice is a large, red, bold message that reads, "You are not protected." The goal of this tactic is to create a false sense of security among inexperienced internet users and persuade them to make a hasty decision to purchase the service.

Figure 3 - SSL encryption on the mBank website

The additional services offered by these solutions also overlap. An integrated antivirus engine is often unnecessary when using Windows 10 or 11, as the latest Microsoft systems already have Windows Defender installed and running by default. Therefore, if your primary goal is to increase your internet security, a VPN may prove to be of little use in such a situation – existing, used solutions will be completely ineffective.