All good things must come to an end, which may be true for the VPN in 2021. VPNs have been a useful enterprise tool for companies since they started in the 90s, but the traditional remote access VPN has Become Obsolete and struggling to keep up with modern cybersecurity needs.
Five Reasons Why the VPN Become Obsolete
- VPNs provide a broad attack surface.
Anyone with credentials to access that VPN has access to the whole network when you use a VPN. And, with so many people working remotely these days, from different devices and over different WiFi networks, it creates a very broad attack surface for hackers. All it takes is getting ahold of 1 person's login credentials, and cybercriminals can gain access to all your business's systems. That's why VPN might become obsolete day by day.
- VPN Service Providers are Not Reliable
To trust a VPN with your enterprise network security, you have to know that they're not tracking or storing the data they control on your network — otherwise, what's the point of a VPN? Unfortunately, virtual private network service providers out there treat your data in shady ways.
That's not to say that there are no good VPN providers out there, but there are increasing numbers of VPN providers that are less trustworthy than they were in the past. This is partly because large companies are acquiring multiple legacy VPNs and changing the way they deal with customer data, and there's no way to know for sure what they're doing with it.
- VPNs lack Strong Central Management Abilities.
Most VPN services don't provide IT teams with a lot of specific, granular control capabilities over different configurations and parts of the network. This makes troubleshooting problems with certain systems or solving individual users' problems unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming.
Also, as we already mentioned, every user that has access to your VPN has access to the whole network. There's no easy way to segment your network and provide users with access to only certain parts or systems.
- VPNs are not Sufficiently Flexible and Agile
- In terms of agility, VPNs are slow to set up and, once they are set up, making changes is very slow. For companies that need to adapt quickly to business changes and want to rapidly change things like who has access to the VPN, working with legacy VPNs can be fairly cumbersome.
- Also, most VPN providers have different tiers regarding how many users you can have on your network, so if you have a hiring boom, you might have to reconfigure your VPN, which can't be done quickly. Thus, traditional VPNs are not a very scalable network security solution.
- Finally, there may be flexibility issues depending on where your users are connecting to your VPN from. The locations of their servers limit VPNs, so if you all of a sudden hire someone working remotely from a country with no nearby servers, it can create connectivity issues.
- VPNs are hard on the outside, soft on the inside
When we talk about VPN security, it can be helpful to compare your network to a village with a castle wall around it to understand how VPNs work. The "wall," or VPN, is hard to get past, but once an attacker breaches it, they have access to everything inside the "village" or your network.
What's Replacing the VPN in 2021?
So, now that you know why the VPN might become obsolete, you might be wondering what you can use to replace it. The answer is a Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) solution.
SDP solutions, such as Perimeter 81, solve many of the problems with traditional VPNs by allowing granular control over specific resources and greatly reducing the potential attack surfaces of networks that legacy VPN services leave exposed.SDPs operate on zero-trust principles, meaning that no one, even inside an organization, has access to any systems or areas of the network that they don't have explicit permission to access.
With an SDP, it's much harder for a hacker to get into your company's network and start wreaking havoc. And, if they do get in, they only have access to one small part, making it easier to mitigate the damage from cyber-attacks. SDP is a clear winner in the network security battle between SDP and VPN. If you and your company are looking to replace your outdated VPN, we highly recommend looking at an SDP like Perimeter 81 for an all-in-one cybersecurity solution.
The Key Takeaway
VPNs have solved enterprise cybersecurity problems for decades, but the way companies work and employees connect to enterprise networks is rapidly changing. There are more remote teams than ever, working from different corners of the globe, which means legacy VPNs present a range of less noticeable issues in years past.
These changes to the way businesses and teams work are here to stay, which is why new enterprise cybersecurity solutions like SDPs are needed to fill in the gaps left by traditional VPN services.
Also published at: https://techsaa.com/vpn-become-obsolete/