Using a remote access solution is different, although technically they are still creating some sort of a tunnel for you to securely connect. The difference is, you are not connected as a remote computer on the work network, you are only making a very specific secure connection to a specific port and specific computer. Not the same as a VPN tunnel, where you basically open up all ports and re-route your communications to the work net. What I prefer is a program like GoToMyPC, or my favorite, LogMeIn.com. They act as a third party to “broker” a connection from your home system to the work system. They do this in an outbound-connection only scenario. What I mean by that is, you don’t open ports up on a firewall and re-route traffic to certain internal systems. (another security hole, possibly) In the LogMeIn setup, it makes an outbound connection without any inward firewall rules. You connect at home to LogMeIN, they know where the work computers is, and they create the connections between the two for you. IMHO, more secure that way.

Does that help? I am not familiar with proxynetworks, but it looks like some similar connection methods as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn.

I might add too, that even though you would still create an inward connection with a firewall rule, I would still greatly prefer an SSH tunnel to another internal system. Like creating your SSH connection with a port forward to RDP on your work desktop. (I wrote a program to do that actually!) But since I’ve discovered LogMeIn, I prefer that the most, it’s just way to easy, no servers and firewalls to manage at the work end. But no matter what, unless there is an actual practical requirement for using a VPN (and I can’t think of one that SSH can’t handle, in regards to remote access), I stay far away from VPN’s. That is, unless you desire to connect to remote networks, then sure, VPN sounds great.