What are the VPN Risks in the New Cybersecurity Scenario

Companies and organisations worldwide have relied on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for decades to enable remote employee access. And with the increasing number of employees working from home has even accelerated the VPN expansion and adoption.

However, remote access VPN solutions put organisations at risk of security attacks as traditional VPN services trust excessively and implicitly.

According to the 2022 VPN Risk report, 44% of organisations witnessed a rise in VPN-targeted exploits since the adoption of remote working; hence, 65% of organisations are considering opting for VPN alternatives.

In this article, we’ll see the cybersecurity risks of traditional VPN solutions and the suitable VPN alternative you can choose for your business.

The Most Common VPN Security Risks

The traditional VPN infrastructure isn’t built for modern enterprises and the workforce and comes with scalability issues and several cybersecurity risks.

Here are the most common risks posed by VPNs in cybersecurity scenarios:

1. Excessive trust

Unlike modern alternatives of VPN solutions, traditional VPNs assume all users and devices to be trustworthy. Hence, they assume excessive trust—allowing every user and device access to the entire enterprise network and resources.

This excessive trust makes it easier for attacks and malicious hackers to access your company’s resources and applications and compromise critical business data and processes.

2. Increased attack surface

Traditional VPN solutions don’t encrypt the data or your employee’s device IP addresses when they access critical company resources from remote locations via public Wi-Fi connections.

Hence, VPNs expose your user’s IP addresses to the external network—making the devices easily accessible to hackers for malicious purposes.

3. Latency risks

With the lack of secure and safe remote access VPN solutions, the risk of user data traffic backhauling through Domain Controllers (DCs) increases.

This results in performance degradation, impeded network connectivity, and latency issues—further impacting employee productivity and performance.

4. Scalability issues

The traditional VPN infrastructure is hard to scale and isn’t optimised for cloud scalability to meet today’s modern and remote workforce needs.

VPN scalability increases management and maintenance complexity and requires huge operational expenditure for infrastructure maintenance.

So, how can you combat these VPN cybersecurity risks and ensure secure remote network access?

Zero Trust Security: The Best VPN Alternative

Zero Trust security is the best remote access VPN solution alternative that removes excessive trust and only grants access to authorised and authenticated users to the required network applications.

It works on the “Never Trust, Always Verify” principle to provide a unified, secure remote access service with enhanced security, performance, and better RoI than traditional VPNs.

Here’s how Zero Trust enhances network security compared to VPNs:

• Allows you to set customised access policies for devices and perform device posture checks—ensuring the right device type accesses the data at the right time.
• Provides granular access control, allowing you to monitor and view users’ activity across the entire network.
• Enhances your company’s authorisation and authentication capabilities with Multi-factor authentication—making it easier to manage user permissions and identities and identify high-risk users.
• Doesn’t expose the entire network to the users and provides access to specific applications only on a need-to-know basis and user roles.
• Removes backhauling and latency issues, enhancing user experience.
• Removes the VPN-based security stacks and management complexity by replacing it with a single secure access solution.

Conclusion

The increasing rise of VPN security risks and vulnerabilities, along with malware and other cyberattacks, makes organisations adopt secure VPN alternatives.

The acceleration in the remote working environment has made 68% of organisations shift their priority to Zero Trust solutions.

So, if you wish to adopt a secure VPN alternative service, browse through the best solution providers, such as InstaSafe solutions, offering VPN alternative with Zero Trust capabilities to make your company cloud and remote-ready and boost employee productivity.