The Internet is a series of tubes
A long time ago when Al Gore said that, people made fun of him pretty bad. It was funny, but turns out the "series of tubes" metaphor is pretty apt. When you connect to a website, you are using a tube that goes from your house to the corner of the street. That tube runs all the way down the road until it reaches a junction, where it splits off in a million directions. Your tube connects to the one it needs, and empties out at Facebook or Google or wherever you wanted to go.
The "tubes" that run today's internet run across the ocean, between satellites, and across radio towers in addition to the old cable lines on telephone poles. They cut across every part of our lives, making the internet ubiquitous. Billions of messages per second are sent flying across this infrastructure. The companies that manage the American network infrastructure have spent a lot of money and time to make sure that every message is delivered securely and on time... one would think.
The faults in our stars satellites
In early 2026, a team of researchers found that they could point an $800 dish at the sky and receive unencrypted data from T-Mobile satellites. The data included text messages and voice calls associated with local police stations and Walmart's corporate network.
You would think that companies as big as T-Mobile and Walmart would know better, wouldn't you?
Since we can't trust the infrastructure to be secure, we have to secure our own communications. Companies have been taking security into their own hands for decades now, using a technology that you are almost certainly familiar with:
VPN
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It is a tube-within-a-tube system, protecting all of your transmitted data to be sure that no one on the internet is looking in on your stuff. Most firewalls can be set up for a VPN for business networks, but here are all kinds of companies offering VPN services, paid and free.
Reminder: If a service is free, you (and your data) are the product that they sell.
If you have a firewall in your office, there is a pretty good chance that you don't have to pay any extra to get a VPN running on your network. It just takes a little bit of know how!
Classic vs. Mesh
That VPN that lives on a firewall in your office would be a "Classic" VPN. Fortigate, Sonicwall, Watchguard and the others all use an "SSLVPN", protecting your connections the same way a website protects itself. Your computer and the firewall join together and give each other special keys so that no one else can unlock the tube that you've built, connecting you back to the office from anywhere in the world. An SSLVPN is usually lightweight, works on most systems, and has been in use since 1994!
Today we have a whole slew of new words and acronyms like "Zero Trust", "Security Service Layers", "SD-WAN", "SASE", and more alphabet soup. Engineers have been trying for years to stay one step ahead of the bad guys, and these are designs and products that they have developed as our series of tubes grew ever more complex and vulnerable.
The "Classic" VPN is still in use today, often leveraging modern design and cryptography to ensure security is robust. Some companies (and some blog-writers) have moved to a "Mesh" style VPN. Rather each computer exchanging keys with the company firewall, each computer will have it's own set of locks and keys that it can use to tell each other "I am who I say I am". In this setup everyone connected to the mesh uses their tube-within-a-tube to connect directly to each other, preventing any data from being spilled into the big internet tubes.
Which one works for my business?
Disclaimer: There are WAY more ways to connect a computer to a network. You've got peer to peer networks, cloud applications, decades worth of protocols and systems are available.
So what should you use? Unsurprisingly, it depends on what you do with your computers. Also unsurprisingly, we can make this promise to our customers:
No matter who you are or what you have, we can make your data mobile