Sales of virtual private networking (VPN) products and services should top $21.3bn this year, according to the latest estimates from San Jose, California-based market research firm Infonetics Research Inc, with future spending levels more than doubling by 2006.

Based on a series of interviews with 240 network managers at organizations already using remote access, site-to-site and/or extranet VPNs, Infonetics maintains that expenditure will grow 117% between 2002 and 2006.

As for technology adoption, market trends indicate that IPSec will remain the dominant tunneling and encryption technology used for VPNs, but that SSL-based products will start to see ready acceptance in certain verticals, or when used for certain scenarios like secure remote access to web-based applications.

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