Cloud providers offer multiple technologies to access resources in the cloud with VPN access being one of the most popular.
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Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have long been utilized to establish secure connections over the Internet, allowing users to access company resources remotely. Many organizations rely on VPNs to access their cloud provider resources securely. However, despite their advantages, using VPNs to access cloud resources present certain challenges that need to be considered.
Leveraging a cloud provider’s VPN over the public internet solution is an inexpensive ubiquitous solution, as commodity internet is everywhere and VPN software is inexpensive. However, it has its drawbacks regarding bandwidth support, visibility, connectivity, and scalability that will eventually cost businesses in ongoing OPEX charges.
Setting up and managing VPNs can be complex, particularly for organizations with diverse network architectures and distributed cloud environments. Configuring VPN connections, managing certificates, and ensuring compatibility with various devices and operating systems can be time-consuming and require specialized expertise. As organizations grow and their cloud infrastructure evolves, maintaining and updating VPN configurations across different locations and platforms can become a significant administrative overhead.
VPNs are point-to-point tunnels, and thus each site you connect to from your data center (or branch office or campus) requires a VPN. Each cloud provider has limitations on the amount of bandwidth a site-to-site VPN will support. This bandwidth may be a result of either tunnel bandwidth limitations or due to restrictions of the VPN gateway in the cloud provider's network, which acts as an aggregation device for remote VPN connections and is often restricted by a total throughput limitation.
As a result, the VPN gateway's capacity and available bandwidth can become bottlenecks, causing delays and performance degradation.
Along with the bandwidth limitations of cloud-provider VPN gateways, there may also be other limitations that are enforced by cloud providers. Whether it is the number of VPN gateways per region or site-to-site connections per gateway, each cloud provider has their own set of rules that may be enforced, making it difficult to maintain a standardized architecture across cloud provider networks.
While VPNs are designed to enhance security by encrypting data traffic, they are not immune to security risks and vulnerabilities. VPNs can be susceptible to attacks such as brute-force attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, or VPN-endpoint compromises. Thus, it is very important to ensure that VPN software or hardware is regularly updated to safeguard the organization from potential security breaches.
Visibility across a VPN connection is limited to the two endpoints. Thus, the necessary end-to-end connection observability from the client to the server does not exist. This lack of visibility or transparency makes ongoing troubleshooting difficult as the operations teams need to patch together visibility from one system to another to see a clear view of the client-server connection.
Deploying VPNs can quickly get out of hand, opening up challenges associated with the lifecycle management for each of them, and underlying costs and security issues that arise from resources that are not properly maintained.
3nets provides a comprehensive connectivity solution across all of your cloud and remote location environments to allow customers to leave their VPNs behind. By deploying the 3nets | Application Service Fabric™ across your environment, you can have a simple, repeatable, and scalable solution for hybrid cloud and cloud-to-cloud connectivity. The solution provides end-to-end visibility, removes many of the existing bandwidth limitations, automates IPSec rekeying, manages endpoint software updates, provides a single interface for any cloud provider, and provides customers with a single secure solution.
Contact us at https://www.3nets.io/ to find out how we can simplify your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud connectivity.
