5 Disadvantages of VPNs for Your Enterprise
With the COVID-19 outbreak and the shift towards a remote working environment—many global companies and organisations are adopting secure network technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
Enterprises enabled remote VPN access to initiate work from home for remote employees and keep the company running. However, according to Zscaler’s 2021 report, although 93% of organisations use VPN for remote access, 94% know that cyber attackers often target VPNs to access and exploit network resources.
Hence, it’s no surprise that there are many risks and disadvantages of using VPN solutions. For example, VPNs often lack to secure modern enterprises to ensure security, scalability, and performance.
Therefore, companies and organisations are increasingly shifting towards VPN alternatives to secure their network against cybercriminal activities. But before talking about the alternatives, let’s discuss the disadvantages of VPNs for your enterprise.
Top 5 Disadvantages of VPNs for Your Enterprise
Here are some of the top VPN disadvantages that make it unsuitable for your modern enterprise and workforce.
Excessive implicit trust
One of the biggest disadvantages of VPNs is that they assume excessive implicit trust in all users and connections. They provide network access to every entity—making it easier for malicious users to access and exploit your network resources and applications.
In contrast, several alternatives to VPN connections only allow trusted and authorised access to network resources—keeping malicious and suspicious users at bay.
Management complexity, impeding scalability
Another major VPN disadvantage is that it’s highly unscalable. As a result, organisations try to minimise the VPN overload issues by adding more VPN concentrators and appliances, increasing network complexity and additional maintenance expenditure.
In addition, configuring and maintaining VPN appliances to ensure high availability requires complex configuration and high cost. Moreover, you need to complement and use VPNs with security tools, and management solutions as VPNs provide remote access and not enterprise-grade monitoring and security.
So, with each additional layer of security tool application or solution—the network gets more complex, expensive, and difficult to scale.
Performance issues
VPN connectivity relies on the public internet—tying the network performance with the public internet’s performance.
Hence, due to increasing traffic, the problems of jitter and data packet loss are common—affecting the performance of critical business applications and resulting in poor user experience. Therefore, the backhauling of user data traffic results in network issues and impedes network performance and connectivity.
Lacks granular visibility and security
When users connect to a network via VPN—they get unrestricted access to the entire network and its resources and applications.
For enterprises, it could mean access to third-party and non-admin users to the network-critical infrastructure—increasing the risks of malware attacks and data breaches.
Hence, to ensure granular security control, visibility, and least privilege access—enterprises choose alternatives of VPN to grant minimum and role-based access to the users.
Increased surface attack and unreliable availability
VPNs increases the surface attack risks by exposing employees’ and users’ IPs to the public or external internet—making it easy for attackers and malicious users to access IP addresses and company networks.
In addition, the unpredictable performance also brings unpredictable availability with no guarantee. VPNs come with the risks of public outages—affecting your company’s productivity, especially if it solely depends on VPNs and the public internet for day-to-day operations.
What is the Alternative Solution to VPN?
So, if not VPN—then what’s the solution for your company?
The solution is the Zero Trust Security model or Zero Trust VPN approach.
72% of organisations are at the early phases of adopting or have already adopted the Zero Trust Security model.
Compared to VPNs, here’s how the Zero Trust architecture benefits your business:
- It works and follows the principle of “Never Trust, Always Verify” to ensure secure remote access—guaranteeing better security and performance.
- Ensures a seamless user experience with single click secure access to applications—eliminating the risks of network latency and backhauling.
- Implements a Privacy First approach to ensure that the network traffic is accessible to you only.
- Removes complexity and redundant VPN security stacks with a unified and single secure access solution.
- Provides granular, user-specific, and least-privilege access to applications.
Conclusion
Even though VPNs are popular choices for organisations—remote VPN access is not the right long-term solution to adjust to the new normal and secure your organisation.
They offer implicit trust, lack granular visibility, increase surface attacks, come with management complexity, performance, and network latency issues.
Therefore, if you want to ensure maximum network security and performance—check out our InstaSafe Zero Trust Security services. We’ll help replace your traditional and legacy setup with an excellent Zero Trust solution to upgrade your security posture for maximum user experience.
So, contact us or book a demo to learn more.