Hate Your VPN?
How to Improve Application Performance for the Remote and Mobile Workforce

Clunky, unreliable, and slow remote access options, like VPN, are the necessary evil that IT administrators love to hate. This vital piece of the corporate puzzle helps keep your information secure and your global remote and mobile workforce in sync. However, it also creates headaches – and high costs – for teams that want to get work done quickly and reliably across distances.

Slow access, frequent disconnects, and poor application performance are the constant complaints from end users to network/IT admins, and something that bodes poorly for productivity and success of the organizations to which those end users belong.

In today’s global business landscape, remote access to data and applications from anywhere in the world is a critical tool. The rise of a remote and mobile workforce means more employees are capable of accessing company information while on the road and away from the corporate headquarters or branch offices. Global enterprises are also partnering with companies in different geographies to outsource or optimize business processes, and they need those employees and partners to access corporate applications in remote locations as well.

Where Do VPNs Fail?

Remote access methods like VPNs can fail in a number of ways: They may be very slow, or they may time out. Users may be able to access the network, but find that download/upload times are excruciatingly long or have much worse performance than they would expect if they were in the office.

The fundamental problem is the Internet.

VPNs leverage this public network of networks, which has multiple bottlenecks. Like a public highway, the Internet can become congested at peak times, causing slowdowns and standstills. If you are at a long distance from your end-point, it will take you longer to get where you’re going, especially if you have a lot of data to deliver.

The unpredictable variation in latency (along with high latency), means that slowdowns in speed and performance of applications are almost inevitable. The Internet is also a lossy network, where congestion along the highway leads to packet loss, continued slowdown, and poor application performance.

How Do Companies Currently Solve VPN Problems?

The current methods for solving poor remote access performance are costly and/or ineffective. For example:

• Wait to get Better Network Access
  When remote and mobile users experience slow VPN performance, they might just wait to get network access thinking that the Internet on the last mile may not be good enough. The wait is often futile as the problem lies in the middle mile.
• Deploy Multiple VPN Concentrators
  When companies have a pressing need to scale, they turn to the IT team to deploy multiple VPN concentrators all over the world. This complex solution is costly and hard to manage, which introduces new problems that will hinder the success of your deployment.
• Use Alternate Methods
  Some workers attempt to work around VPN issues by simply sending emails and asking others to deliver messages and files. This can lead to miscommunication and loss of information.
• Use Shadow IT
  The point of using VPN is to keep information safe. When VPNs fail, some workers upload files and attempt to access information through cloud applications like Dropbox, which are not authorized by the enterprise. This is a huge security risk, as well as a lack of compliance.

A Solution for Today’s Remote Access Performance Needs

Aryaka’s solution, SmartACCESS, solves the challenges of slow and unpredictable VPN performance by taking the Internet out of the equation.

SmartACCESS is the first clientless SD-WAN for remote access. It is the only solution that combines dynamic CDN capabilities with SD-WAN technology to deliver reliable, fast and predictable remote access anywhere in the world. Delivered as a cloud-based service, enterprises can deploy it in hours and scale in minutes.

Aryaka SmartACCESS combines dynamic CDN capabilities with SD-WAN technology to deliver fast and reliable application performance anywhere in the world for remote and mobile employees.

By building our own private network of 28 points of presence (PoPs) around the world, we’ve put 95% of the world’s business users  within 30ms or less from the closest end-point. These PoPs are fully meshed into a fully managed global private network.

This private network, which also can be optimized for faster application performance, bypasses the latency and packet loss issues experienced on the public Internet and replaces the need for your in-house IT team to deploy and manage multiple concentrators.

This makes your applications fast and predictable, and supports all those who require access to your corporate network– no matter where in the world they travel and work.

As a clientless solution it also allows enterprises to continue using their existing VPN technology without disrupting security models, enabling global business and expansion initiatives immediately. It supports all corporate applications, including on-premises and cloud/SaaS applications that can be backhauled over a data center connected by secure networks.

SmartACCESS enables IT to realize the full benefit of their VPN investment and ensures a more productive remote workforce.

Stop hating your VPN and start working smarter with Aryaka’s SmartACCESS. Learn more in our datasheet here.