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Site to site VPN? Static IP? IT pro needed?
My wife is a family physician in a single doctor office. After the Doctor Who was sharing space with her moved out she had to move to a smaller office and decided she wanted to switch back to Mac based software for her EMR (electronic medical records) since the software she had been using really stinks and it’s hard to work with for her and her staff we went back to the company we used years ago when she opened her first office in 1997 she tried to be her own business manager and we had to file for bankruptcy this time she has a business manager and an office manager but we still want to be frugal since doctors offices that are not owned by big corporations especially family med are very low on the economic food chain. After we purchased the EMR we discovered that we need to have a site to site VPN I spoke with our ISP they don’t provide VPN I spoke with express VPN they don’t provide site to site VPN I spoke with Apple they don’t provide a VPN of any kind. I spoke with the EMR support people they recommended hardware in the neighborhood of $2100 it included a firewall which we already have and a router we have two of those because Comcast gave us one for signing out and the guy who why are the office gave us one I don’t know what we would do with three plus an expensive contract. I am trying to find the most economical site to site VPN I left a message here the Thursday before last and heard nothing back I know you’re very busy so if I can only speak with one of your tech wizards and not the digital goddess HERSELF that would be acceptable but I need help! I need help fast! Because until we can get the new software up and running we are contracted with two EMRs and they are not cheap and my wife and I are! IN THAT VEIN DOES IT REALLY REQUIRE AN IT PROFESSION TO CONFIGURE A FIREWALL AND VPN OF THIS TYPE? THE ONE I’VE SPOKEN TO SO FAR IS TALKING ABOUT $3000 PLUS ALMOST $150 AN HOUR!!
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3 Replies
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Hello PMF412,
It should not be costing you that much especially if your business is less than 20 people at each location.
If you have similar firewalls, real firewalls not rented hardware from the ISP company and static IP addresses you should be able to configure a site-to-site VPN within a few minutes.
Recommended firewalls for each site if you are renting your firewall – Fortigate Fortinet 60-E roughly $500.00 Ea. and can be configured within a few hours by any IT professional worth their weight. Additionally, if you are not paying for static IP addresses these firewalls can still be configured with a site to site VPN using the Dynamic Domain Naming convention.
If you let me know which Firewalls you are using at each site I might be able to better direct you.
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At this time we only have the firewall that is built into the software that comes with Xfinity/Comcast routers and the electronic firewall built into the latest macOS. Since my post I have learned I can get a static IP from my ISP for about $12 a month from Comcast. I learned that much from the IT professional who was trying to sell me on his service he also informed me of the need for a VPN license. I have begun looking at hardware-based firewalls and the one you suggest is in the price range of the ones that I have seen. We have one office and up to five people who will be using the VPN when we’re offsite they want to be able to access information from our server. From home in the event of foul weather or after-hours treatment or in my case double-checking that the hardware is running properly. Unless configuring a firewall is a lot more difficult than configuring the router or configuring the VPN is extremely difficult I suspect I can do it myself. Am I thinking too much of myself? I know that Kim’s sponsor “express VPN” does not do site to site VPN. Do you have any suggestions for finding a good vendor
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I recommend Fortinet Fortigate devices, “You can have up to 100 concurrent VPN users. The FortiGate 60E can handle more than 25,000 new sessions per second and more than half a million concurrent TCP sessions.”
Once you have static IP addresses, and you have configured your required firewall settings for any devices that need such as VoIP phones or anything hosted internally.
Click here for a YouTube video showing how to configure the site to site IPsec VPN.
This hardware would also give users the ability to have users connect to internal servers remotely, but that will require some more configuration.
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