Cisco Products Enable a Secure VPN

A wide variety of Cisco products actively support VPN connections throughout the network. Cisco’s Unified Client Framework strategy enables all adhering VPN client technologies to connect to any Cisco central-site VPN concentrators, including the Cisco 3000 series VPN concentrators, PIX Firewalls, and Cisco IOS-based routers.

The Cisco VPN software client is typically provided at no charge with central site concentrators, so the software client is inexpensive to deploy and scale to large numbers. These VPN clients have specific limited operating system (OS) support and might require some level of support. These software clients could be impractical in those extranet environments where the organization doesn’t own or control the remote PC, such as in a franchise or customer location. The organization might not want to absorb the expense associated with maintaining and supporting non-company workstations.

Cisco small router and firewall devices can be an inexpensive way to provide security features like stateful firewall and VPN capabilities to remote sites. Unfortunately, these devices don’t scale beyond a few hundred devices. Deployment, monitoring, and ongoing support can be inconvenient, time-consuming, and expensive because of the variety of features and options that must often be manually configured at both ends of the connection.