Three months again and I had never heard of a VPN – a virtual private network. Now, and I wonder why we all don’t have one.
With the price of data the way it is – and the availability of free Wi-Fi throughout Asia and Europe (Australia shamefully lags far behind) it didn’t take much to realise that Wi-Fi is the only way to go. This has been of some concern to us given the degree and extent of identity theft these days. Using an unsecured Wi-Fi network – especially for banking or financial reasons is leaving ourselves wide open to problems. After a little research it has become obvious that we will need a VPN. To use a quick and easy analogy – imagine the internet as a river with lots of people using it. Throw some dye (that’s your data) into the river and everyone can see it and where it ends up. Put a pipe into the river from one point to a point to where you want to go, throw the dye into the pipe and no one can see it. It arrives at the point to where you have pointed it – undetected. A VPN is this pipe. Its a secure link between you and where you are connecting to.
A little more research and suddenly we are bombarded with just how many VPN services there are available. Express VPN, IP vanish, NordVPN etc etc. All offering a plethora of options and prices. Which one to choose? No two reviews could seem to agree on the best service to use. In the end we decided to go with ExpressVPN. It was touted as one of the fastest with a large choice of servers in Australia, England and Europe.
After having to do so much research – actual implementation has been extremely easy. Purchase a subscription (we found a good 15 months for the price of 12 months deal), install on the devices you will require it on and that’s it. Each time we turn on our iphones, ipads or laptop the VPN loads automatically and our browsing is now secure (or as secure as it can be). 
On a small aside – at the same time we installed our VPN – we decided to also start utilising a password manager program. Given how many passwords one needs these days – and how complicated they now need to be, we have decided to go with a program that stores and creates difficult passwords. No need to now keep lists of difficult passwords or have them accessible in our iphone settings. Finding and installing the program was again relatively easy – setting it up and using it (especially on an iphone) has been much more complicated. I’m not sure if we have the total hang of it yet – but at least we are trying. If interested the program we went with was LastPass.
