By placing a firewall between your local network (LAN/WLAN) and the Internet, you can make it very hard for hackers to gain access to your local network. That is, if you have configured your firewall correctly. This can be especially important for businesses and people with sensitive information on their computer systems. A very neat function most hardware firewalls have is the ability to securely connect the local area network to other local area networks in different locations over the Internet, thus creating a Virtual Private Network (VPN). With VPN you can safely share network resources with remote offices or play games with your friends as if you were on the same LAN!