One of the advantages of the iPhone for corporate users is the fact that the user can access a Virtual Private Network (VPN) straight into a corporate network directly from the iPhone. The advantage of this facility is that the user send and receive his/her work email directly on the iPhone, without the need of visiting the office.

The iPhone has the ability to connect to servers supporting PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) and L2TP/IPSec (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol over the IP Security Protocol). The majority of corporate networks will support at least one of these two protocols or technologies.

The iPhone 2.0 furthermore consists of capabilities of connecting to Cisco servers, which is the most widely used system across the United States by large corporations.

Setting up VPN

On your iPhone, visit Settings à General à Network à VPN. Tap the on/off button and a VPN Configuration screen will pop up.

Now tap the protocol used by the company who’s VPN you wish to access. Your options are PPTP, L2TP and IPSec. This information can be obtained from the systems administrator of your organizations systems.

The following information needs be completed. Again, this information can only be obtained from your systems administrator:

Server
This is the Internet address of your VPN server.

Account and Password
Your systems administrator needs to set up a user account and password for you to access the systems. Here you need to enter the username and password provided to you.

Secret
If your systems make use of L2TP technologies you will require another password, known as the Shared Secret. This needs to be entered here.