VPN challenges: Understanding disconnection and latency issues with VPN. Why should your organization move to Zero Trust Access?

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is used by most organizations for their remote employees who need to access corporate applications or servers from anywhere. VPNs are a popular and preferred method to access private networks using public networks. The popularity of VPNs is because the technology is relatively simple to set up and easy to use. But the VPN technology comes with its own set of challenges with respect to reliability and its security aspects.

During pandemic time, with all employees working from home, disconnection issues with VPN were quite common, which created various challenges for IT administrators and resentment among employees.

Let's understand why the disconnection occurs with VPNs.
VPN client software and VPN server send each other encrypted data or signed ping data every 10 seconds to communicate with each other with their active status. If the client software doesn’t receive a ping packet for more than 120 seconds, the client assumes that the server is not available and the communication is disconnected. This can happen if the ping packet is lost or gets blocked. An unreliable internet connection can cause packet loss and packets can get blocked during packet filtering by the router.

Disconnection can happen if there issue either with the user device settings or server or network issue. There could be multiple reasons which can trigger disconnection. With regard user device settings, if the user devices stays ideal and gets into sleep mode, then the connection can be lost. If there are lot of users connecting to the server and huge amount of data flow can cause a bandwidth issue with server which can cause disconnection.

There is one more major issue with VPN, i.e., latency. Latency is the amount of time between when a user performs an action and when they receive the response. For example, a user clicks an image and how long it takes for the image to load. The loading or response time can be more or less based on the location of VPN server and the data server. Suppose, there is an user in India and VPN server is in Australia and data server in Singapore, then the encrypted data packet will go from India to Australia, the data will be decrypted and then move to Singapore, then reverse path to follow for getting the response. These long travel time can cause latency issues which can be avoided by connecting the VPN server nearest to the user.

VPNs are also insecure as they expose the entire networks to threats. The excessive trust issue with VPN and lack of granular access controls can pose significant risks to the network once the user is compromised.

Avoiding latency issues with InstaSafe Zero Trust Access:
Instasafe Zero Trust architecture is a split plane architecture where there is a separate data plane and control plane. After the user and device authentication gets completed, the user device is directly connected to the zero trust gateway through an encrypted tunnel without having to route through any other intermediary server. This eliminates the latency issue arising from the backhauling of traffic.  

Zero Trust is an entirely cloud delivered solution. Multiple gateways can be configured which can handle a large number of concurrent users and intelligent routing.  Zero Trust access also addresses the security challenges of VPNs with granular access control mechanism which ensure right users can access authorized applications and not the entire network.

For more information, book a demo using this link: https://instasafe.com/book-a-demo