What Is Remote Access VPN? | Zscaler

Do You Need a VPN for Remote Access?

Traditionally, a remote access VPN was the gold standard for remote security, as encrypting the traffic between user and data center was enough to keep yesterday’s attackers from viewing and obtaining sensitive information. This allowed users to securely access and use their organization’s network and applications as if they were working on-site, at headquarters.

The way users work has changed, though, and with applications moving to the cloud, the perimeter has extended to the internet, rendering network-centric solutions such as remote access VPNs obsolete as they suffer from these modern pitfalls:

• Placing users on-network, which increases risk
• Providing a poor end user experience
• Requiring heavy configuration as well as appliances, ACLs, and firewall policies
• Lacking the ability to provide application segmentation
• Missing crucial visibility into app-related activity

By today’s standards, VPNs are incredibly vulnerable as attackers often use them to infiltrate and move laterally across an organization’s entire network. In the next section, you’ll see why there’s a need to sunset VPN use in favor of a more robust, cloud-delivered security solution.