In the past, IT people delivered access across networks that they trusted to people who worked for their company on machines that they managed.

This was the extent of so-called remote access and was based on the assumptions that the organisation owned or greatly influenced the network (dial-up), the people (employees) and the end-points (the corporate machines).

But today all of these conditions have changed while the assumptions and many of the technologies have stayed the same. And this presents a big problem if you're a chief information officer (CIO) challenged with extending and managing remote access to more people and places and across more networks.

The network is the part of the problem that's had the most attention. The fact is that we no longer control the network; it's now the wild and unmanageable internet.

So, faced with the world's least private network, companies set about making it 'virtually private' by combining encryption technology with Internet Protocol (IP) and so was born the IPSec virtual private network (VPN).

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