Can VPN's Handle the Strain of Employees Working From Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
In a matter of days, the public health crisis escalated in America and many of the work force was told to work from home. It’s been challenging for businesses. IT departments around the country were given very little time to make sure their employees were given a reliable setup to be able to be productive from home.
Part of a successful work from home protocol includes the use of a virtual private network. Working from home has already become a trend in the American workforce, and many businesses across the country already had VPNs in place. The problem is that VPNs in many cases aren’t equipped to handle the entire employee base of a company. Are VPN’s equipped to handle the increase of people working from home?
Global CISO at Zscaler, Stan Lowe says, “I’d bet my next paycheck that most organizations plan for a maximum of between 10 percent and 30 percent of their employees connecting concurrently to their existing infrastructure. When you plan for VPN utilization, you plan for a maximum load of about 30 percent of your overall population. But now it’s not 30 percent, it’s not 60 percent, it’s not location specific. It’s all of their employees, and that's not typically how you plan. You don’t plan for an event that affects the entire company.”
IT departments are having to stretch the capacity of their VPN while finding ways to get their business done. So how do you get the most out of your VPN?
For businesses that don’t already have the VPN capacity they need, doing it now is probably not going to happen. Lowe says “That presents a problem because of long lead times. If you have to ramp up additional capacity to be able to support your base, you’re not going to be able to do that. You’re looking at doing some interesting internal juggling by tiering your applications. Businesses are going, ‘Oh, it’s going to be the financial system, it’s going to be the manufacturing system, it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that.’ But really, one of the most critical business systems that people have is email. Email and instant messaging and conference installations are actually the most critical business applications. You’ve got to figure out how to support that.”
Additionally, you can reduce the strain put on your VPN by developing a plan to manage when employees use it. “You end up saying, ‘Okay, you’re in group one, you have access from 0800 to 1600. You’re in group two, you have access from this time to that time,’ etc. That’s not really conducive to the way some businesses work, because the organizations that you’re dealing with don’t work like that,” says Lowe.
Another issue presenting itself in regards to working from home is the security of your VPN. With a large amount of devices that will be connecting to their networks, it leaves companies more vulnerable to attacks for both the individual and the organization.
Some solutions like multifactor authentication and unified endpoint management can be implemented to keep a grip on network access. But one of the best security measures you can take is educating your employees on security best practices. According to Stan Lowe, keeping employees aware should be top priority.
“You walk around any office building, there’s a cybersecurity awareness campaign going on whether they know it or not,” says Lowe. “They also don’t have the ability to pop up over the cube and ask their next-door neighbor, ‘Kevin, what do you think about this email? Do you think it’s kind of sketchy, or not?’ They don’t have the ability to do that. Employees think that they’re just as protected as they are at the enterprise. And they just don’t have the backup resources to be able to ask those questions. Implementing an education and an engagement methodology for your remote workers with regard to security is critically important.”
Whether your company was already set up, or your organization had to do some last minute scrambling to allow other to work from home – by using some creative thinking and implementing security best practices your business can successfully transition to a work from home environment.
Story via BizTech Magazine
