What Is VPN?
Overview
Virtual Private Network (VPN) establishes secure, reliable, and cost-effective encrypted connections between your on-premises network or data center and a virtual network on the cloud.
Note
VPN supports only non-cross-border connections.
- A VPN gateway provides an Internet egress for a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to connect to a customer gateway in your on-premises data center.
- A VPN connection connects a VPN gateway to a customer gateway through encrypted tunnels, enabling communication between a VPC and your on-premises data center. This helps quickly establish a secure hybrid cloud environment.
Figure 1 shows the VPN networking.
Figure 1 VPN networking

Components
- VPN gateway: a virtual gateway of VPN on the cloud. It establishes secure private connections with a customer gateway in your on-premises network or data center.
- Customer gateway: a resource that provides information to the cloud about your customer gateway device. It can be a physical device or software application in your on-premises data center.
- VPN connection: a secure channel between a VPN gateway and a customer gateway. VPN connections use the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) and IPsec protocols to encrypt the transmitted data.
Parent topic: Overview
- Overview
- Components