Many organisations and businesses use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to ensure network security and provide remote access to employees in today’s age of remote working environments.
However, these VPNs don’t meet modern security requirements and often affect your network’s speed and performance—resulting in network latency.
In this article, we’ll learn what VPNs are, what makes them slow down the speed of your network and what’s an alternate solution for VPN that ensures maximum speed and security. So, let’s begin!
What is a VPN?
VPNs are virtual channels or tunnels that connect remote users to network applications to enable access and communication. For example, they enable remote employees and users to connect to the corporate network.
However, with today’s increasing remote connectivity needs and growing traffic volumes—VPNs prove to be bulky, expensive, slow, and insecure solutions for secure remote access, which are some of the biggest disadvantages of VPNs.
What Makes VPNs Slow Down Your Network?
VPNs work by stacking network protocols on top of one another to transport data and payloads between private networks across the public internet.
Here’s how the common VPN protocols—PPTP, IPSec, and L2TP generally work:
- These protocols are stateful protocols that require a handshake and heavy negotiation before establishing a connection.
- They require exotic network configurations like TCP 1701 and UDP 500—which aren’t typically open in firewalls, and some countries may have blocked them.
- As they continuously stack the user payloads, it ends up bloating the payloads—adding 10-25% of overhead.
In addition, VPNs provide excessive implicit trust to all the users—assuming everyone to be trusted and allowing malicious entities to enter the network and exploit its resources.
But this implicit trust also increases the network traffic, and the backhauling of user and employee data traffic through data communication results in impeded network connectivity and latency and performance issues.
Besides slow performance, other demerits of VPN include increased attack surface, difficulty to scale, increased management complexity, and increased overhead costs.
What’s a Secure and Reliable Alternate Solution for VPNs?
One of the best VPN alternatives and network security solutions is the Zero Trust Security model.
Unlike VPNs—Zero Trust doesn’t trust anyone and assumes every entity to be untrusted. Instead of providing implicit user access throughout the network—Zero Trust provides user role-based access to specific network resources after an authentication and authorisation process.
Thus, Zero Trust completely removes the redundant VPN’s security-based stacks—requiring complex management and replacing them with a secure and unified user access solution.
So, since it minimises the steps to access resources and provides single-click application access to users—Zero Trust eliminates the backhauling and latency issues and ensures a seamless and quality user experience.
Thus, when it comes to ensuring security, privacy, seamless user experience, and high performance—Zero Trust proves to be the perfect alternative to VPN.
Conclusion
VPNs that are traditional and legacy-based security solutions no longer meet modern security requirements and often slow down network speed and performance, resulting in latency, poor user experience, and employee productivity.
VPN comparison with the Zero Trust model makes it a weak, inefficient, and insecure network security solution.
Thus, if you want to leverage the benefits of the Zero Trust framework for your organisation—you can check out the InstaSafe products to optimise network connectivity and ensure the utmost security against cyberattacks and data breaches.
Also Read: Use VPN On Android: Here’s How It Works