Connect Android devices to Veeam PN for secure access

How many times we use the mobiles and other smart devices to connect to resources in the “office” network? And how many the phones are used to tether the connection for the laptop? Probably far too many. And let’s face it, when the WiFi is available in public networks things are a lot easier to the point where we might even forget about security. Which means putting our data and devices at risk. Antiviruses and firewalls are a great combination together and it would be even better when paired with a secure connection accessing internal resources. Especially in the corporate network. This article quickly explores the steps on how to connect Android devices to Veeam PN for secure access. Android phones like just Apple and others offer great flexibility with various VPN clients. These can be simply installed as an “app” or easily leverage the built-in VPN support from the mobile phones.

In a previous article we explored the steps to create a Veeam PN client configuration file which essentially leverages OpenVPN solution. Likewise it is possible to quickly connect Android and other devices which have the OpenVPN client installed. The purpose of this article is to show the steps to configure an Android device to securely connect to the office network where Veeam PN is running.

What are the main advantages to connect Android and other devices to Veeam PN? Secure connection from anywhere for apps that require access to internal resources and secure tethered connections to any resource when using the phone as a modem (PAM).

Without much further ado let’s take a look at these simple steps.

Connect Android to Veeam PN

Once the OpenVPN app is installed on the phone it essentially provides 3 options. For this example we’ll use the OVPN profile. In essence it’s just a matter of importing the OpenVPN configuration file previously created with Veeam PN.

The Veeam PN configuration file already includes the certificate information to encrypt the VPN connection to the corporate network.

Let’s make sure the Veeam PN configuration file is already present to the mobile phone. Now there are multiple ways of copying and importing files on the phone. Probably using emails or a sync client like OneDrive, Dropbox and similar make this task very easy. In this case let’s place a copy into /storage/emulated/0/Download folder.

As soon as the file is copied this will be shown in the list. Of course there might be more ovpn configuration files.

Let’s select the desired file to use for the connection and tap on import.

The ovpn configuration file generated by Veeam PN is now imported successfully. We could repeat the same procedure to add more configuration files to connect Android to different networks of the business. For example, organisations might be willing to create separate Veeam PN configuration files to connect to different countries or areas of the business.

Let’s select the imported Veeam PN connection file and swipe to start the secure connection with the office network.

As soon as the connection can be established the OpenVPN app is showing a message to allow monitoring of the connection. This is required to help monitoring information for real-time and dashboard statistics like network usage, consumption and speed.

As soon as the message is accepted the OpenVPN clients securely connect Android devices to the corporate network. This allows the phone to “directly” access corporate resources. Same applies when tethering the connection to a laptop.

From the Veeam PN console it is also easy to review the connected clients and sites with additional information on bandwidth usage.