It’s been almost 3 years since the world changed and everyone learned what a pandemic is. Students were told to stay home, and school district IT teams were trying to figure out how to get everyone together so that learning continued. With kids at home, working parents now had to be home. While some organizations were remote, most organizations previously had remote access for about 10-20% of the workforce. Most people were expected to be in the office so building out a remote access system wasn’t necessary. In some areas affected by extreme weather, like snowstorms, hurricanes, and tornadoes, the remote access capabilities were sometimes better to ensure business continuity.
In March 2020, every IT person made the same decision; buy a lot more of whatever remote access VPN they had already deployed, regardless of all the known issues and pains they experience. If they could buy it, because of the surge in demand and the short supply of hardware, just buy anything regardless of price, compatibility, features, performance, and so on. IT folks were already thinking of how to improve and unify their access, but they didn’t have the choice to be picky so new hardware with a couple of years of support was ordered.
While we’re not done with Covid, we’ve moved past getting everyone access to ensuring that we’re focused again on making sure our users are productive and happy while our organization is secure and not showing up in the news for the wrong reasons. It’s time to retire that Covid-era legacy VPN and get something far better.
To help you think about what needs improvement, I’ve compiled a quick list:
- Deploying physical appliances
- Virtual VPN appliances weren’t built for cloud
- Deploying appliances in Active/Passive clusters
- Having numerous VPN appliances listed for your end user
- Providing full access to everyone
- End users having to remember passwords
- End users being confused by multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Inconsistent authentication policy when on-premises and off-premises
- Inconsistent device posture policy when on-premises and off-premises
- Inconsistent authentication policy when accessing SaaS
- Inconsistent device posture policy when accessing SaaS
- Requires many inbound ports on your firewall
- Need external IP addresses
- Need DNS updates
- Not being able to immediately address out of compliance devices
- May require multiple solutions based on the types of devices the workforce is using
- May require different solutions based on what they are connecting to
With all of the limitations of legacy VPNs listed above, is it really in the best interest of your organization and users to pay support renewals for a product that barely meets minimum requirements? We don’t think so. Banyan’s Team Edition allows you to enable a better solution for free, forever, for up to 50 users. To take advantage of the rest of your identity and security stack and to scale out to more than 50 users, our simple-to-deploy Business and Enterprise Editions are also available.
To learn more about what Banyan offers and how we can help you improve your legacy infrastructure, visit banyansecurity.io or check our demos in YouTube.
