This is Not Your Father’s VPN

To many, VPNs seem unremarkable and haven’t changed much in the past decade. A VPN is a VPN is a VPN. Some even think that VPNs are hardly necessary with the rise of building encryption directly into email, browsers, applications and cloud storage. The reality is that—especially for small and medium businesses (SMBs)—VPNs are still vital; they can and should take on additional responsibilities to meet the challenges of a largely remote workforce and the increasing amount of IT resources and infrastructure residing in the public cloud.

In today’s challenging and ever-changing environment, modern VPNs are less about point-to-point encrypted tunnels and more about enabling a new kind of networking to secure employees and other users, regardless of where they are located, and protecting cloud-hosted resources, ranging from SaaS applications and services to storage. In essence, this represents a shift to a cloud VPN that ensures secure access and provides necessary controls while also enabling agility and scalability. The internet is the network, but a cloud VPN is a secure, virtual, private network within it.

Traditional Corporate Networks

For many companies, the idea of a traditional corporate network is long gone. Even enterprises with sizable physical offices may no longer offer anything resembling a local area or wide area network. Most simply have internet access points. Even peripherals, such as printers, may be connected directly to the internet. Some companies have most or all of their employees working remotely and, for them, the network is comprised of each individual’s internet connection. Some companies no longer have physical office locations at all and, instead, rely on shared workspace locations as needed. Again, the network is wherever these might be. At the same time, for a growing list of companies, all systems, applications and storage are in the public cloud.

Rethinking VPNs

The new cloud reality calls for a rethinking of VPNs that shifts from connections from discrete points—offices, private data centers and remote access VPNs—to new cloud networks tailored to each organization that encompass all access points and all resources. Such cloud VPNs…