The truth is, although Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are an amazing technological innovation, they’re are far from perfect. At times you require particular things not to pass through your VPN, and that’s where the whole concept of split tunneling comes in. Generally, it’s a feature that allows you to manage all your network devices to determine which does or doesn’t get the VPN treatment. But, how can you easily connect or disconnect your VPN when you want to switch between different activities, for example, if you like playing multiplayer games while watching Netflix? Well, split tunneling can be very useful. Let’s take a look at how this technology can be applied.
What is Split Tunneling?
When you’re using a VPN during your usual activities, all your available network data passes through a protected VPN tunnel. No data gets out of the tunnel or exposed to the public Internet. You already know that when you aren’t connected to a VPN, your network traffic usually gets routed to their specified LAN or WAN destination. In short, your data can be viewed by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and other websites when you aren’t connected to a VPN. For this reason, it’s known that VPNs boost your privacy and security on the Web.
Split tunneling allows you to do both simultaneously. You can be connected to a VPN while simultaneously accessing public network resources. You get to choose which data goes where.
Why Use It?
When you use a VPN as an all-or-nothing solution, your data may be prone to various drawbacks. A VPN’s main objective is to provide you with a private and protected channel through which you can send and receive information anonymously. Not all activities we carry out on the Internet, however, require to be private and secure. In such cases, a VPN tends to be more of a nuisance.
Apart from your naked connection, a VPN might also have a significantly worse performance thanks to different overheads. That can ruin the experience of things such as online gaming or video streaming. Lastly, if you want to use a network printer or network-attached storage on your LAN while you’re connected to your VPN, you may experience problems.
How to Set It Up
There are several methods in which split tunneling is obtained in the networking world. With a commercial VPN service that provides split tunneling as a choice, it’s nearly always configured via the VPN client software. How VPN providers choose to provide is obviously up to their discretion. You might be allowed to select specific applications or traffic types that need to be excluded from the VPN tunnel.
Specific network devices can also be excluded from the VPN; this needs a router-level VPN. For those who are using an Android app or a Windows client, you can only manage the traffic flow from that particular device to the tunnel. If there’re other devices on the same network, they won’t be affected so long as there’s no VPN client between them and the Internet.
Now you have seen that this is a simple concept that is not so difficult to understand. However, it’s crucial that you choose a VPN that supports this type of technology. You can then use that software to customize your requirements.
