When VPN came on the scene it was revolutionary. Employees working from home, or while traveling, now had remote access to corporate email and applications running in the data center.
But as with most game-changing technologies, the party was great until the downfalls began to come front and center. These tunnels created a direct connection to everything on the network. Lateral movement presented a huge security risk, offering the potential of spreading malware across the network, or giving attackers access to sensitive data. Vendors and staff had the same network access. And as the number of VPN connections increased, so did the attack surface.
The Covid pandemic forced a dramatic expansion of VPN services. Additional appliances had to be added to the stack as the vulnerabilities of VPN were magnified when usage increased.
Today applications have moved to the cloud and users are working on non-company-issued devices. So why are so many companies still using technology from the 90s that was designed before the cloud even existed?
In the new perimeter-less world, the cloud is the center of everything (if you can call it a center). But often user traffic continues to be backhauled to a data center before reaching its destination.
The answer is not to keep adding VPN appliances and further increasing the complexity of an already cumbersome technology but instead move to access private and web applications based on a user’s identity.
This is accomplished through a zero-trust network approach that moves away from accessing networks with hundreds of hosts and applications and moves towards providing users secure, segmented access to individual applications.
Under this premise, we developed Trustgrid’s Agentless Remote Access. As a replacement to VPNs it allows for any user on any device to connect to private or web applications (cloud or data center hosted) without requiring additional layers of security appliances, expensive proprietary hardware and weeks of configuration. As a cloud-delivered, software-defined service it provides Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) without hardware or software management, making it easy for networking teams to deploy and maintain.
Access to new applications can be added quickly with the deployment of Trustgrid nodes or minimal firewall rule changes. And the platform natively solves remote access DDoS and load balancing challenges without additional hardware or configuration.
And because access is delivered through a web portal, users can access private applications from any device with configuration time reduced by up to 90%. New users can be granted access in minutes, applications can be added in hours and access can be decommissioned at the touch of a button.
Trustgrid’s agentless remote access is the VPN for today’s IT environments.