Abstract The rapid growth of e-business in past few years has improved companies efficiency and revenue growth. E-business applications such as e-commerce, remote access has enabled companies to manage processes, lower operating costs and increased customer satisfaction. Also the need rises for the scalable networks that accommodate voice, video, and data traffic. With the increased dependability of networks the security issues are raised and networks become more and more vulnerable to different types of security threats. To overcome security issues different security technologies are in action by vendors and technologists. Also for the survival of many businesses to allow open access to network resources, today’s networks are designed with the requirement of availability to the Internet and public networks, therefore, information confidentiality is the major issue in these networks to ensure that the network resources and user data are as secure as possible. With the requirement of network security, concept of Virtual private network was established. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) can be defined as a network in which connectivity between multiple customers’ sites is deployed on a shared network with the same security as a private network. Different VPN technologies and protocols architectures are available in market among are MPLS VPN architecture, IPSec VPN architecture, and SSL VPN architecture. Like With the introduction of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), which combines the benefits of Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing, it became possible to construct a technology that combines the benefits of an overlay VPN with the benefits of peer-to-peer VPN implementation in which routing is simple. MPLS/VPN is a new and simple technology, which provides simpler to routing and also makes number of topologies easy to implement which are otherwise difficult to implement. All architectures have benefits and drawbacks, also each of them can be implemented separately or in combination of other according to customer security requirement and performance of the network.

Remote access is a way of providing access to networks from outside the premises of the network. Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one solution used to provide remote access. Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) is another solution that is capable of providing access to resources from a remote location. These two technologies use different security models yet provide comparable remote access functionalities. This thesis project investigates the basic components, architecture, and security services of SDP and IPSec VPN. Additionally, a performance evaluation is conducted on SDPand VPN on their connection setup time and network throughput. Our result shows that both SDP and VPN provide secure access, however, SDP has additional features that make it a more secure solution. This thesis project is written in the hopes that it can help enterprises with or without a VPN solution already in place to consider SDP as an alternative solution and learn SDP in comparison with VPN.