I recently had a client come to me who needed to find a way of increasing their overall WAN connection speed. They are part of a large membership organisation which means that every member has a VPN connection to their central office, whilst this was great 10 years ago, now everyone uses the internet a lot more, so having those extra hops to the outside world and extra security permissions which don’t allow them to use OWA or remote web workplace is a real downside. So, I was asked to come up with a solution that would allow them to have a new internet connection, using an LLU ISP, so that they could get a much faster connection speed. I started to have a look on the internet and spoke to a couple of colleagues to see what solutions were out there, unfortunately I couldn’t find many solutions that would allow me to connect a device to the network without modifying ports or settings on the existing VPN connection, which we are unable to do. Eventually I found out about the Peplink Balance devices, after reading through their documentation and looking at their videos it seemed like a very good offering, it provided me with the ‘drop-in’ configuration and allowed me to install more than just the one WAN device as my clients internet availability grows.

I ordered a Peplink Balance 30, which priced at under £500 is a great buy. The device is extremely easy to configure, you simply need to setup your new WAN internet connection and connect your Peplink device to your router, then connect your laptop to the LAN port on the Peplink device. Simply login to the control panel and follow the on-screen instructions, you can setup load balancing, port forwarding and other outbound policies. You could even setup a Policy that prioritised all CEO’s traffic above the rest of the company. I needed to setup the device to ensure all VPN traffic was sent through WAN 2 which was the VPN connection, so I simply created an outbound policy that took any source IP/Subnet traffic and requests for their central HQ server IP, enforced the traffic over WAN 2 and clicked apply. It’s a simple as that, of course there are many other settings you can play around with, such as limiting bandwidth to certain departments, only allowing the marketing team to use WAN 3, the possibilities are endless!