VPN Market Trends

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There are numerous VPN technologies available from a variety of vendors in the VPN market. There are the standard, mature protocols such as IPsec, and the less mature ones such as MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). The VPN market trends are leaning towards not just smoothing out the rough edges on these technologies, but also looking forward to additional applications of them, and ways to integrate them so that networks can communicate even if they were provisioned differently.

There are a wide variety of vendors to choose from when selecting a VPN service. While the VPN market is one of the few technology markets that is still experiencing reasonable growth, this explosion of vendors and their varying takes on technologies has led to some problems in integration and communication between VPNs.

The VPN market trends are to try to resolve some of these issues. The market is focusing on improving gateway and client management software, something that has been a "hidden cost" and major headache in VPN administration.

New software is making it easier to configure multiple VPN gateways consistently, in addition to making it easier to distribute software or policy updates to users. There is also an emerging trend to improve security functions in their offerings, and to allow those functions to integrate with other devices.

In fact, overall, different vendors' remote access VPN clients cannot generally interact with another vendor's VPN gateway; but VPN market trends indicate that strategic alliances are being formed to do just that.

The current VPN market trends also involve improved service agreements for when problems arise. At the moment, some service providers offer reasonable service-level agreements for VPNs, but that's not true for all of them. Performance will take on an additional facet of importance as the trend continues to develop for customers to use their VPNs for voice-over-IP traffic as well.