Here are the two primary ways you can use VPNs to secure your rented infrastructure:

1. Site-to-Site VPN (IPSec)

This is used to connect your entire office or on-premises data center to your OCI Virtual Cloud Network (VCN).

• Cost: $0. Oracle does not charge for the VPN service itself, the number of tunnels, or connection hours.

• Bandwidth: Supports up to 250 Mbps per tunnel by default, but can be scaled significantly higher depending on your Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and routing configuration.

• Redundancy: OCI automatically provisions two tunnels per connection for high availability. If one goes down for maintenance, your traffic automatically reroutes through the second.

• Routing: Supports both Static Routing and BGP Dynamic Routing (the industry standard for large enterprises).

2. Client-to-Site VPN (Remote User Access)

If you have individual employees working from home who need to access private servers, you have two main options:

• OCI Bastion (The "Cloud-Native" Way): For simple SSH or RDP access, you can use the OCI Bastion service. It’s a managed, identity-aware proxy that lets you connect to private instances without a full VPN. It's Always Free.

• OpenVPN Access Server (The "Full" Way): For a traditional "VPN Client" experience, most OCI customers deploy the OpenVPN Access Server from the OCI Marketplace.

  • Note: While the software is easy to deploy, you will pay for the VM it runs on and any license fees required by OpenVPN.

Comparison: VPN vs. Other Connections

3. VPN Logging & Troubleshooting

One of the hardest parts of cloud VPNs is knowing why a tunnel dropped. In 2026, OCI integrates VPN status directly into the OCI Logging service:

• You can see real-time "Phase 1" and "Phase 2" negotiation logs.

• You can set up Alarms to text or email your team the moment a VPN tunnel goes offline.

4. Multicloud VPN

Because OCI uses industry-standard IPSec, you can use the Site-to-Site VPN to create a secure bridge between OCI and other clouds (like AWS,