The Duo Blog
Problem:
The Traditional VPN Is No Longer Enough
Since the 1990s, virtual private networks (VPNs) have been well-suited for the purpose they
were built for – to grant employees
temporary access to corporate networks and resources when they weren’t logging
in from an office. While
VPNs have since been the widely used standard in doing this, they weren’t built
to handle a scenario in which most – or even all – employees wouldn’t be in a
physical office for months at a time.
As we all
know by now, today’s work environment has shifted to being largely remote. Driven
significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, remote work hasn’t been the
ephemeral experiment some may have seen it as before: A recent survey by
Upwork estimated that over 36 million Americans will be working remotely
by 2025.
While organizations could benefit from giving employees this added
flexibility, IT and security teams have had their hands full.
With VPNs,
employees are generally given broad access to the network without any sort of
intentional vetting of their role, workgroup, device, or location. The
massive influx of remote work has complicated this, as security vulnerabilities
could be exposed through a traditional VPN. This has
made it challenging for organizations to rely exclusively on VPNs for securing
remote access for the entire workforce.
Here are
some of the modern-day realities that
challenge traditional VPN usage:
- Limited access to distributed
applications, whether on site, available as a cloud
software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, or within a private cloud infrastructure
like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure. - Temporary workers, contractors and
vendors might not be able to connect to company networks. - A significant increase in remote work
at scale has put an unexpected and often unmanageable load on VPNs. It is no surprise then, according to Gartner’s
analysis, that an
estimated 60% of enterprises will phase out most of their rem
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