As companies move to the cloud and depend less on physical servers and network connections, their reliance on VPNs for security will eventually evolve, if not disappear altogether.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) have for a generation been viewed as the connectivity solution for the distributed enterprise, enabling secure remote access for mobile workers and branch offices back to the business-critical data at headquarters. While these connections are viewed as far more secure than the public Internet, VPNs are no longer the only solution for securely vetting enterprise traffic – let alone the most efficient one.
In reality, the days of ubiquitous VPNs may be numbered. These and other backhaul configurations make network management unnecessarily cumbersome as more and more remote workers and mobile devices flood enterprise networks, requiring their own dedicated VPN tunnels. The drawbacks of such complicated configurations are innumerable, and only get compounded every time a new device joins the network.
