But as remote-access vendors try to compete with VPNs on cost, managers will be challenged to sort out the bottom line. Despite the promise, industry experts say that the uptake of VPNs has been slow at best and they attribute the trend to a fear of using the Internet for business purposes and to the immaturity of the product area. Conn. The hospital uses remote-access servers with a bank of 16 modems to let physicians dial in directly to the network and retrieve information such as patient records and lab reports.
Security can be a problem with the Internet, and the performance has been a problem too.
According to analysts, fear related to the security of data passed over the public Internet is rampant, perhaps unjustifiably. Some of that is misplaced. While companies are eagerly making plans to leverage the low-cost public infrastructure for business needs, its actual use remains low, and by most accounts VPN use is even less. Infonetics Research Inc., a market-research company in San Jose, Calif., estimates that only 1 percent of the Internet traffic today is related to VPNs, and the number is expected to grow to only 15 percent or 20 percent by the year 2000. There's a real buzz in the industry and potentially a very real economic gain.