VPN Alternatives - Solutions For Remote Access

What are VPNs’ Security Risks?

VPNs create an encrypted connection between two points. However, they have various limitations that create potential security risks to the organization:

• Degraded Visibility: VPNs are designed to be a point-to-point solution for secure remote access, meaning that all employees have a distinct connection to the enterprise network and each business site requires its own link to other sites. The resulting complexity of the enterprise network makes it difficult to perform threat detection and data analytics across the enterprise WAN unless the organization’s VPN solution is designed to combine visibility across all encrypted connections.
• Inefficient Routing: VPN infrastructure is often designed as a “hub and spoke” model, where all traffic flows through the corporate network en route to its destination. As companies’ users increasingly work remotely and data processing and storage moves to the cloud, this creates an inefficient detour that degrades network and application performance. As a result, employees may attempt to connect directly to cloud-based resources, robbing the enterprise of traffic visibility and the ability to inspect cloud-bound traffic for potential malicious content.
• Lack of Built-In Security: VPNs are designed to provide an encrypted connection between a remote worker and the enterprise network, with the intent of providing a user experience similar to being connected directly to the enterprise’s Wi-Fi or an Ethernet port. A VPN provides no protection against malware, data exfiltration, or other security risks. Unless an organization has a full security stack deployed between the VPN and the enterprise network, infected remote machines can be used as a stepping stone to attack the enterprise network.
• Limited Scalability: As a point-to-point security solution, VPNs scale poorly. With the sudden surge in remote work, this has resulted in severely degraded network performance. As a result, organizations and employees are commonly adopting insecure workarounds (such as the use of split-tunnel VPNs or making local copies of sensitive data) to reduce the impact of poor VPN performance on employee productivity.
• Software Vulnerabilities: The sudden surge in telework has made VPN endpoints a common target for cybercriminals. Exploitation of unpatched VPN software vulnerabilities is one of the top three most common methods by which cybercriminals infect an organization with ransomware.