This is even more the case in these times of Covid. Many employees are working from home, whether or not they’re employed by companies with huge or tiny payrolls. But the distinction is important – and this is what my marketing friend was getting at – because if you look at tiny businesses, they tend to need different networking infrastructure than so-called small businesses the size of small departments or divisions.
For our purposes, specifically for this article, we’re looking at the best VPN solutions that can fit businesses operating from homes as well as small offices. Two of them, NordLayer and Perimeter 81, can scale to larger small businesses. The other two, Surfshark and ExpressVPN, have tools that help small business owners manage multiple subscriptions and licenses. Let’s take a look.
Also: How to choose the right VPN for your business You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV. Also:

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NordLayer checks all the boxes, allowing work-from-home individuals to connect to the corporate on-site network over an encrypted tunnel, as well as providing site-to-site and dedicated IP options. Additionally, NordLayer provides business-level management functions including integration into single sign-on solutions, team permission management, and centralized billing. Home-based business operators buying into Perimeter 81 may find themselves put off by Perimeter 81’s minimum-seat requirements of 5 or 10 seats, depending on the plan. Overall, we think this is a solution better suited to larger small businesses and small departments than home-based businesses. But it may well be ideal for companies that have responded to Covid by sending workers home and need a way to extend a secure network into all their employee’s homes. Also: How does Surfshark work? How to set up & use the VPN We’ve looked at the Surfshark interface before, and agree with the company that, “The key value of Surfshark for small businesses is that one does not need to have a dedicated IT person to set up a secure VPN tunnel while at the same time getting use of VPN security features.” Do be aware that there is no indication of consolidated billing or business features on the main Surfshark.com site. To get business-level services, the company advises you to reach out to partners@surfshark.com and begin a dialog there. If you do, let me know how it works out for you. See also:

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While the company does not offer a business product, it does offer volume discounts for companies who wish to buy for multiple employees. For consolidated billing, we’re told you can contact its support team, who will set up a master account along with child accounts, which allows you to pay for an entire team with one payment.  Second, everything had to have some kind of unified billing. It didn’t make sense to call something a business plan if you had to make 10 individual credit card payments each month for your ten employees’ VPN accounts. While the checkout mechanism for ExpressVPN and Surfshark do not offer unified billing, both companies advised us that you can contact them and they’ll set up account management services for multiple accounts. And, finally, we’ve been testing most of these products for going on years now. While I don’t use any one VPN constantly, I have run most of these through my testing process, and the results are provided along with the recommendation. Beyond that, keep an eye out for any egregious renewal pricing and conditions. Most of the vendors I spotlight either don’t have renewal fees that slam you after a few years or, if they do, I point them out so you can watch out for them. One more thing I recommend is you start a dialog with the various customer and tech support teams. If you’re running your company on these services, find out how responsive and communicative they are. Considerations are also different if you’re a worker assigned to use a business VPN, compared to the manager choosing a VPN for use by employees. Again, communications security is the top priority in a business VPN, followed by performance, and often management features like access control and billing. But if you’re in a big small business, say with a thousand employees, you’re going to need a much larger set of IT-level features. In this article, we’re focusing on very small companies and those working from home, and for those businesses, a business-class VPN or even a good consumer VPN will do just fine. Don’t spy on your employees. Judge them by their actions and whether they meet their commitments. Just sayin’. Don’t.