Employees need secure, high-performance Internet access 

January 4, 2023
Access Tech: How secure is your employees internet connection?

  

To do their jobs, employees need high-performance, secure access to corporate networks and IT assets. As remote and hybrid work schedules become more common, companies are deploying secure remote access solutions, such as virtual private networks (VPNs) to support them. However, this often means making tradeoffs between the performance of remote workers’ network connectivity and its security. 

High-Performance Internet Access is Essential for the Modern Business 

As companies have adopted remote and hybrid work policies, corporate IT assets are increasingly moving to the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-native applications can offer improved performance, availability, and scalability for an organization’s employees and customers. Remote workers need high-performance network access to corporate networks and resources.  

Where Legacy Secure Remote Access Falls Short 

A secure remote access VPN is essential. Legacy VPN solutions are simply not designed to meet the needs of the modern enterprise.  

Some of the primary ways in which they fall short include: 

  • Inefficient Routing: Remote access VPNs are designed to route remote workers’ traffic to a VPN server, which is typically located on the corporate headquarters network. With companies’ IT assets not located on-prem, this creates inefficient routing that degrades network performance and increases latency. 
  • Inadequate Security: Protecting against cyber threats and implementing a zero-trust security policy requires additional solutions alongside or instead of the VPN servers, which increases the cost and complexity of an organization’s IT infrastructure and limits its scalability. 

Choosing Both Performance and Security 

VPNs’ design and lack of built-in security forces a tradeoff between network performance and security. Allowing remote users to connect directly to cloud-based assets, which provides the network performance that companies need, bypasses perimeter-based security stacks and leaves the organization at risk due to VPNs’ lack of built-in security. 

Avoiding the tradeoff between network performance and security requires replacing legacy VPNs with a modern remote access solution. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) provides numerous benefits over VPNs, including: 

  • Cloud-Native Design: SASE is deployed geographically near an organization’s IT assets, reducing network latency, and enables full advantage of the benefits of the cloud. 
  • Zero-Trust Access Control: SASE solutions integrate secure remote access capabilities in the form of zero-trust network access (ZTNA). This allows them to implement zero-trust access controls for remote users, a capability that VPNs do not share. 
  • Integrated Security: Integrating security solutions with ZTNA eliminates the need for standalone security solutions alongside a VPN endpoint and enables direct connectivity to cloud-based assets without backhauling traffic to an on-prem security architecture or sacrificing security for network performance. 

Corporate networks and business needs are evolving, and VPNs are not keeping up. Learn more about improving the performance and security of your corporate by contacting us at Access Tech where we can provide an assessment of your current security situation — and how to improve them. 

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