COVID-19: Secure Remote Access Services in Demand as Enterprises Continue Work-from-Home Strategies

Published: September 10, 2020

Introduction

The impact of coronavirus will be felt longer after the crisis has passed. The pandemic, the closures of offices for non-essential workers and the ensuing work-from-home strategies have certainly been disruptive, but there is a silver lining. Companies were forced to support remote employees with little notice and largely succeeded. According to 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Coronavirus Flash Survey June 2020 - Advisory Report, the authors note that in the same survey from March 2020, "8% of organizations had already experienced a disruption [meaning inability to meet debt obligations or deliver an agreed-upon service, or the loss of a major client] with 5% expecting [a major disruption] within a month, and another 26% expecting it within three months. Three months later, that disruption has mostly failed to materialize. Currently, 13% of organizations say they have experienced a major disruption, an increase of only five percentage points versus March." Equally important, a large minority of respondents in March, 40%, were experiencing issues with employee productivity, while in June that number dropped to 28%, with 12% reporting resolving their productivity issues.

 

Most organizations have a secure remote access strategy in place for those workers that travel outside the office or for IT support people to access IT systems from home when they are on call. VPN capabilities have been available on firewalls, routers and gateways for decades; however, when countries enacted shelter-in-place and social-distancing polices aimed to stopping the spread of the virus, office workers suddenly working from home needed secure remote access. Organizations that had VPN gateways had few options other than buying more hardware and more licenses, which is expensive and that the time, the duration of working from home was thought to be short and the cost for the VPNs wouldn't be a wasted expense. The increased use of VPNs led to more WAN traffic, especially as video conferencing took hold and enterprise IT responded by asking users to disconnect from the VPN when connecting to video conferencing, which naturally affected users having to disconnect and reconnect from the VPN as the situation required.

During this time, VPN services, security services, MSPs and cloud services responded with secure remote access services that were cloud managed and off-loaded the remote connectivity from the enterprise WAN. In many cases, the secure remote access services also provided high-speed access to cloud services like Salesforce, AWS and Azure. These services also included value-added features like security and performance optimizations for applications. The primary benefit of cloud managed secure remote access for vendors, resellers and enterprises is the ability to quickly scale up or down when needed while still managing costs. Enterprises using a cloud managed service were able to support all their users on day one, minimizing one aspect of operational disruption.

Where companies see success and benefits of work-from-home policies, they plan to continue them. According to 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Coronavirus Flash Survey June 2020 - Advisory Report, 67% of organizations expect to continue work-from-home policies with the result that 47% of organizations expect to reduce their physical office footprint. More than 20% expect to reduce it by more than 25%.

Technology

Many cloud managed secure remote access vendors present themselves as a VPN killer as if they must compare their products to something inferior, but that's not really the case. Services in this segment use VPN technologies and architectures to form the basis of their services, but additional security and performance optimizations along with workflows designed to ease managing users at scale take cloud-managed secure remote access services to the next level beyond VPN gateways.

However, there are increased risks with remote workers, which we discuss at length in our report Will the work-from-home explosion revolutionize enterprise security architecture? Many of these products and services can also be classified as zero trust networks (ZTN), software-defined perimeters (SDP) and secure access service edge (SASE), which layers security and security management features for connected users whether they are on-premises or remote. Enterprises can use these services with or without using the advanced security capabilities and many of these services offer flexible plans for a la carte enablement to all or a subset of users.

Nearly all the secure remote access services support a variety of authentication systems and services commonly used by enterprises, as well as multi-factor authentication for secure tokens, reducing the operational overhead of managing users. Group and roles assigned in the directory where users authenticate, like Microsoft's Active Directory, can be used to assign policies defined in the service or elsewhere, further easing management.

A critical factor for enterprise IT to evaluate – and a significant differentiator for vendors – with these services is determining the types of applications that will need to be supported. Web applications are easily supported by all the managed services either using a proxy architecture or intelligent routing. Non-web applications like direct database access, fat email clients, voice, and file sharing usually require an installed or downloadable client component to create a VPN. Not all the services support non-web applications and for some of them, doing so is complex and is reserved for internal IT use.

Some SD-WAN vendors like Big Leaf, Simplewan and VMware use low-cost hardware appliances for home use. The benefit is that the appliance completely isolates the user's laptop from a home network and is easy for the employee to deploy. However, hardware appliances for remote employees are expensive, might be difficult to manage and can make support and troubleshooting difficult. It's a piece of hardware employees have to install and power. It may not work well with their home networking set-up or that of their broadband ISP and the appliances are not portable when employees want to work out of the home and office.

The final critical component is licensing. One of the benefits of enterprises using a cloud managed remote access service is that they were able to rapidly scale up their client licensing to support the sudden increase in usage. Enterprises with on-premises VPN products had to acquire new hardware, licenses or both to meet demand and still they place limits on VPN usage. Enterprises using cloud services have come to expect flexible licensing schemes that can scale as needed with shorter fixed terms.