Recently there have been many articles written that predict the death of VPN. That prediction may be a little premature but the way VPNs are being used is definitely changing.

VPN technology originates from the era when services such as email, file servers, CRM systems and others were hosted on a customer’s own premises or data centre. If remote users needed access to these, they fired up their VPN client and suddenly had access to everything in the office.

Often the VPN ensures that the remote user is adhering to company data policies. For example, all internet traffic is sent over the VPN before going out onto the internet. This means that the traffic can be proxied, firewalled and examined for malicious or unacceptable content. Security rules, and policies can also be pushed out to those on the VPN.

This worked fine when most people were in the office and there were a handful of remote users working from home, customer sites or hotels for example. However, working patterns have changed over the past few years (particularly this year) which means this model starts to become inefficient and several issues start to become problematic.

The Problems with Traditional VPN

Firstly, with many services being hosted in the cloud, remote users accessing cloud services across the VPN can saturate all the office bandwidth, especially if they have fast broadband connections.

Secondly, because of Covid-19, more staff are working from home. Again, this can saturate the office bandwidth and degrade user performance when accessing critical business applications.

Also, many home users living in rural areas can have poor broadband connections which mean they also have a poor user experience.

Finally, many businesses have relied on the good nature of their employees to use personal equipment when working from home. These machines may easily be compromised by malware and viruses which then compromise the corporate network too.

How Can Replify Help?

Replify Accelerator can help in several ways here. The Replify Accelerator client works seamlessly with VPN clients. This reduces the amount of data used by each remote user. Hence lower bandwidth and an improved experience for the user. This effect is magnified for those users on low quality connections.

Many VPN and mobile device management providers can address these issues, however those using legacy VPN solutions are still suffering.

This acceleration can take place between the user and the VPN server or directly between the user and the cloud provider if their VPN supports split tunnelling.

Replify Accelerator can also reduce the bandwidth used between the VPN server and the cloud providers. This frees up bandwidth needed to service the VPN clients.

Finally, Replify Accelerator uses TLS 1.2 tunnels for secure data connections between Replify Accelerator endpoints (TLS v1.3 support will be available in our upcoming release). This provides additional security for legacy applications that may not be using the latest TLS technology.

If you want to find out more on how Replify Accelerator can work alongside your VPN, particularly for remote users please contact sales@replify.com