A Virtual Private Network (VPN) typically used by companies and organization to allow their employees to remotely connect to their central office network from anywhere on the internet. VPNs can connect individual users to a remote network or connect multiple networks together.

For example, let us assume that you work for a company that is headquartered in USA. If you are traveling in Japan or Singapore or India for work and want to access files, folders, database, printers and other network resources back in your USA headquarter, then you can use VPN.

Such VPNs can also be used to bypass any blocking or censorship or websites that may have been done by your college or company’s network. Instead of accessing the Internet through the censored and filtered firewall of your network, it is possible to get unrestricted full access to the Internet by simply establishing a HTTPS encrypted VPN connection to a public VPN service.

One of my favorite Secure VPN service is HotSpot Shield. HotSpot Shield is a free VPN service that establishes an HTTPS encrypted VPN connection between your computer and their getaway, hence giving you full unrestricted to access to everything on the internet. Your local network thinks that you are connecting to a random harmless server on the internet. In reality, you are using that secure encrypted connection to access blocked content on the internet.

HotSpot Shield can be downloaded from http://www.hotspotshield.com and installation does not take more than a few minutes. Once HotSpot Shield has been installed on your computer, you can lunch it to tunnel all Internet traffic from your computer through their secure HTTPS VPN service. No configuration or changing of setting is required.

Now when you lunch any application on your computer, it will automatically route your internet access through the VPN service of HotSpot Shield. A quick connection to http://whatismyipaddress.com reveals my IP address as 198.144.116.84 and my location as California, USA even though I am actually in India.

Once you are done with your work, you can disconnect from the HotSpot Shield VPN network by clicking on its icon in the taskbar notification area.