In the wake of the growing Coronavirus pandemic, companies have urged their workforce to set up remote working capabilities to sustain business continuity. The surge in teleworking, work from home, and remote workers have created a major challenge for most company’s cybersecurity infrastructure. For ensuring uninterrupted productivity, IT teams are cutting corners and ignoring existing security policies and practices which will have major implications for business continuity in the long run.
It is an enticing opportunity for enterprises to test the merits and perils of operating global teams without shared offices. As Shibu Paul, Vice President International Sales of Array Networks, told CXOToday, “With WFH becoming the new normal, enterprises are turning towards SSL VPN to remotely access important network resources and connect remote users to corporate resources. The demand for access, security, and performance has increased as well. SSL VPN settings help in maintaining network security regardless of the employee’s location which is ideal for the current work situation amid corona pandemic. The advantage of SSL VPN is it can be connected anytime, anywhere.”
Traditional VPN solutions typically provide business continuity for a portion of the workforce. According to Paul, what companies require is a purpose-built platform that ensures the following:
- Performance and user experience – The ability to achieve latency and throughput performance, and improve the end-user experience thus protecting end-user productivity.
- Scalability – The ability to scale to a large number of concurrent users on a single hardware platform without performance degradation.
- Security – The ability to provide not only encryption but also deep packet inspection and application-level filtering without adversely affecting overall system performance.
The various shortcomings associated with integrated firewalls/ VPNs can all be addressed by using a platform built specifically for SSL VPNs, believes Paul.
“We need a purpose-built platform optimized and streamlined for operations delivering dramatically higher throughput and lower latency as compared to add-on SSL VPN platforms while allowing for a much higher number of concurrent users and SSL sessions,” he said.
SSL VPN security has become paramount with everyone working remotely. Enterprises need a centralized access solution that ties together all aspects of the user’s identity, device, and network permissions, and can uniformly enforce policies, even for groups they do not control. As cybercrimes are on the rise, the purpose-built platform should ensure strong authentication, including support for built-in one-time password, third-party multifactor authentication support, and application-layer firewall protection.
According to Paul, “At this point, it’s smart to look for the best ways to make something good come out of this situation and to create our silver linings. Enterprises need a VPN platform that can grow with you to meet the VPN requirements of tomorrow.”
According to a recent report by Allied Market Research, the global SSL VPN market was pegged at $3.45 billion in 2017 and is projected to $5.33 billion by 2023, registering a CAGR of 7.5% from 2017 to 2023. Rise in demand for secure remote access for employees, customer and business, growing incidences of cyber-attacks, surge in demand for cloud-based security solutions, and increase in BYOD trend have boosted the growth of global SSL VPN market.
However, the vulnerability of SSL protocol to external threats and lack of host security software installments on endpoint devices hamper the market growth. On the contrary, growing awareness about data security among organizations is expected to create lucrative opportunities in the near future.
