Business VPN Solutions: Selection Guide

In short: a business VPN encrypts the traffic between your staff, your offices and your servers so that remote work, branch connections and server administration do not travel over the open internet in plain text. The right product depends on company size and how much you want to manage yourself: OpenVPN or WireGuard on your own server for small teams, FortiGate or Cisco for larger networks, NordLayer or Perimeter 81 when you want it as a service.

Why a business needs a VPN

• Security: traffic between employees, partners and the company network is encrypted, so data cannot be read on public Wi-Fi or at the ISP.
• Remote access: staff reach internal systems from home or on the road as if they were in the office, and branch offices connect to headquarters over a permanent tunnel.
• Privacy: the company's real IP addresses are hidden and online activity cannot be tracked from outside.
• Admin access: management ports of servers (SSH, RDP, database) can be closed to the internet and opened only to VPN users.

The main options

OpenVPN Access Server

Open source and widely trusted. Uses SSL/TLS encryption, scales from a handful of users to thousands, and gives you detailed access control and logs. You run it on your own server; the free licence covers two concurrent connections, paid tiers more.

WireGuard

A newer protocol built into the Linux kernel: much simpler to configure than OpenVPN, faster, and with a far smaller attack surface. Ideal for connecting a few people to a VDS. Lacks the user-management GUI of commercial products unless you add one.

Cisco AnyConnect

The standard in large corporate networks. Secure mobile connections, multi-factor authentication, automatic encryption and real-time threat protection, integrated with Cisco's other security products. Needs Cisco hardware and licences.

NordLayer (formerly NordVPN Teams)

Aimed at small and medium businesses: easy setup, a user-friendly interface, per-user access control, firewall management and a central control panel. AES-256 encryption and end-to-end protection for data shared between employees.

Perimeter 81

Cloud-based, built around software-defined networking (SD-WAN). Secure access to the company network from any device anywhere, continuous monitoring and threat prevention. Suited to companies that put security first and do not want to run their own servers.

Fortinet FortiGate VPN

Part of the FortiGate firewall: supports both IPsec and SSL-VPN, analyses network traffic, detects threats early and protects against data leaks. The natural choice if the company already uses Fortinet hardware; see our Fortinet guide.

How to choose

Running your own VPN server

A small VDS is enough to host OpenVPN or WireGuard for a team. Our VPN server setup checklist walks through the installation; the Türkiye VDS and France VDS plans come with unlimited traffic and DDoS protection, which matters for a server every employee routes through.