VPN

How it works

• Wraps your traffic in encryption.
• Lets remote staff reach office systems as if they were in the building.
• Needs MFA and current firmware, because an exposed VPN gateway is a front door.
• A consumer VPN hides browsing from the Wi-Fi owner and offers little for business access.

What can go wrong (example scenario)

A four-person engineering firm opened Remote Desktop directly to the internet so staff could reach the server from home. A password guessed by bots became a ransomware incident within a month.

How WILDCARD handles it

Network covers the firewall, switch and on-premises authentication. A VPN on that firewall, with MFA and current firmware, is how remote staff reach the office. Patch Management keeps devices current.

• A law firm's partner reaches the document server from home over the firewall's VPN with MFA.
• A dental office with two locations links them with a site-to-site VPN so both see the same server.
• A contractor on a hotel Wi-Fi uses the VPN before opening accounting.

Example scenario: A small surveying firm had staff in the field for weeks at a time. They connected to the office server through a VPN with MFA on every login. When a flaw in their VPN appliance was announced, the firmware update was applied the same evening, and the published exploit found nothing to use.

A question owners ask

If my files are in the cloud, do I still need a VPN?

Often no. If everything lives in Microsoft 365 or Google, a VPN adds little. It matters when there is a server, a NAS or a line-of-business app that lives in the office.