SYSK 75: Do You Use Your Computer From Public Places? If Yes, Read This...

With public access points available across town in coffee shops, restaurants, libraries, hotels, and airports, web access on the road is both abundant and convenient. But there's a big problem with all this openness: there's no way of knowing how secure these networks are, and who's listening in on the other end.

As you know, packets traveling over the VPN tunnel are encapsulated and encrypted, divulging no useful information about their contents to eavesdropping packet sniffers. 

In addition to safe surfing, you'll also get secure, remote access to other local resources like network drives, printers, and shared files from other networked PCs.

There are a number of free and low-cost options out there, varying in complexity and performance, one can use outside of the corporate network.

If interested, check out Hamachi (http://www.hamachi.cc/) or search for other low cost VPN solutions.

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1932959,00.asp