With ever increasing demand for doing business on today's and tomorrow's Internet, competent Network Engineers place securing private networks, whether they be small or large, at the top of their priority list. This introduces the problem of how to ensure users have uninterrupted access to Internet resources without having to allocate public IP addresses to each computer which is just not viable given the current shortage.

Two potential solutions were introduced for consideration: IPv6 and IPv4 NAT. The latter soon found its way into just about every firewall available on the market today and looks to be the answer for now, but it has the adverse effect of preventing two disparate peers from communicating directly with each other without assistance.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has improved awareness of firewall "hole punching" techniques that address the inability for peers to communicate directly. However, it often means new software has to be developed or existing software needs to be modified in order to take advantage of P2P communications which can sometimes be costly, inefficient and result in proprietary protocols that other software may not understand.

iWebGate's patent-pending VLAN/MP2P software solution solves this problem by working at the Layer 2 level and provides a viable alternative to traditional VPN solutions. Unlike VPN, connections do not need to traverse a VPN server in order for two disparate peers to communicate via legacy network connections. The VLAN/MP2P software connects the two peers at a pseudo-layer 2 level allowing any legacy network aware software to communicate using P2P technology without the need to re-write a single line of code. New applications can also take advantage of this software with the need to understand how P2P software connections work - this is all taken care of and applications can continue to be written using traditional sockets libraries.