NordVPN

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, became very big during the pandemic. The rapid increase in remote access work opened an expansive target landscape for hackers and VPNs have become an affordable and effective protective solution. VPNs are a logical layer of security to add to any network and all connected devices. NordVPN advertised a high level of privacy without sacrificing speed. The following is our tech department's reactions to this product:

NordVPN is very easy to set up. Even VPN novices should be able to set up and use NordVPN with ease. Our average setup time was about 8 minutes. Unlike many other VPNs, Nord runs at very high speed and does not sacrifice bandwidth for security. As privacy is the number one feature of all VPNs, Nord has added its own layer of cyber security by operating a RAM-only network of servers that are flushed regularly and do not retain any browsing data or personal information about you. Also, they do not store any logs about your activities. Except for error reports and diagnostics, no data is collected (you can opt out of those). Nord's jurisdiction is in Panama, and they undergo routine independent security audits, thereby making browsing even safer and more difficult to trace.

NordVPN lives up to its claims about speed. The NordLynx proprietary tunneling protocol allowed us to retain approximately 90% of our connection speed. As many other VPNs cut connection speeds by up to 50%, NordVPN's speed scored big points with us. 10% reduced speed is a small price to pay for the substantial security afforded by NordVPN. When we selected server locations closer to us, we found the speed to be even faster. NordVPN boasts over 5100 servers distributed across 60 countries, so excellent connections should always be easy to achieve.

We tested NordVPN on several major platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linus and Chromebook. We also tested the mobile versions for iOS and Android, which we found consistent in quality, privacy and speed. Furthermore, NordVPN seems to have no DNS leaks, so DNS requests are not revealed to ISP DNS servers. Finally, for mobile browsing, we found the NordVPN extensions for Firefox and Chrome to function seamlessly, as expected.

Overall, we found current pricing to be very reasonable. Also, NordVPN has an excellent kill switch that is superfast and breaks all connections very quickly. The only issue we found with NordVPN is that it only supports peer-to-peer file-sharing (torrenting) on specific servers.

In summary, we found that the pros of Nord VPN dramatically outweigh the cons of this product for small to midsized businesses to add a robust layer of cyber security to their networks.

Rating

Overall

4.9/5