To VPN or Not to VPN?
Remote work is here to stay, and VPN is no longer sufficient to provide a secure way for people to work remotely. A new approach leveraging digital workspace solutions is needed.
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It’s a question many organisations are asking as they work to provide secure and reliable remote access at scale
Technologies that enable employees to work from home have been around for decades. Many companies had been using them to enable a small portion of their employees to work remote on occasion. But in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most have been forced to shift the majority of their employees to working from home.
Many thought it would be a temporary situation. But the fact is, remote work will likely be the new normal, even after employees can safely return to their offices.
This shift gives businesses an opportunity to redefine themselves and enable flexible models that provide a superior employee experience that improves engagement and productivity, without compromising security or performance. But it has also opened a whole new set of security concerns that must be addressed, including an expanded attack surface and an increase in global phishing and denial-of-service attacks, hacking attempts and data theft. Now more than ever, zero trust is critical. And to ensure it will require a new approach to remote app and data access.
A new approach
When remote work moved from something a few people did to a mandate for nearly all employees, companies around the world scrambled to scale up their resources and enable it. Many responded tactically and reached for Virtual Private Network (VPN) technologies, as they have long been the traditional way to access corporate applications and data outside corporate locations. But a VPN approach is not a panacea for widespread remote work in the short or long term. Here’s why:
A risky proposition
As anyone in the IT security space knows, the larger the attack surface, the higher the risk of compromise. And with more workers accessing corporate systems and data from home – in many cases on unsecured personal devices - the surface has never been greater. Nor have the security concerns associated with VPNs, including:
What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander
VPN may work for a small subset of users. But there are challenges in scaling it to accommodate larger groups. There’s a high interdependency on performance when multiple users are connected simultaneously to the same network equipment (it results in bandwidth and resource contention of the hardware delivering remote access, all the way to the infrastructure hosting the company resources). If five per cent of users download large files over the VPN tunnel, they will have a negative impact on the other 95 per cent of users.
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Managing complexity
In addition, a traditional VPN solution is not only complex to set up, but time consuming to administer and manage. Adding licenses and scaling up a VPN Concentrator can be quickly and easily done. But there are significant costs associated with enabling VPN broadly, considering the layers of solutions (MDM, Endpoint Protection, HDD encryption, network resizing, and more) required to ensure sure security isn’t compromised when it’s rolled out.
An alternative approach
So what’s an IT administrator to do? Consider digital workspace solutions. With digital workspace solutions, you can provide users with access to all of the apps and information they need to do their jobs, including enterprise web-apps, SaaS, and virtual and mobile apps, anywhere, anytime on any device and:
And when used alongside application delivery control tools, you can deliver a more reliable experience than you can using VPN as such tools:
There is a silver lining in every cloud. Companies that embrace digital workspace solutions to fuel remote work can overcome the security and reliability issues inherent in VPN and deliver a high-performance experience that keeps employees engaged and productive, while gaining new levels of agility that accommodate their business today and position them to thrive in the future.
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Adi Trivedi is a Principal Sales Engineer with Citrix, a leading provider of digital workspace solutions.
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