Enterprises Re-Evaluate VPN Requirement Post GoI Relaxation and India’s Leap Towards WFH

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 5, 2020, tweeted that standing true to their commitment towards ease of doing business, they had simplified telecom department’s OSP (Other Service Providers) guidelines boosting IT/ITeS and the BPO/KPO industry. While this is certainly a big push for enterprises to relax their internal norms helping their employees also to bask in the happiness of being allowed to continue their remote working, there is one factor that needs more focus now more than ever, which cannot be neglected, and that is risk and security management. The government’s initiative will help companies in many ways to cut down their expenses and focus on only core areas which need improvement by dedicating their budgets to just those factors, but this also means that CISOs have more responsibility of keeping their employees within the secure perimeter and this can be achieved with a best-of-breed, state-of-the-art SSL VPN.

“Prior to the recent global pandemic, most organizations considered their remote access requirements as met. The MeitY Secretary said that 75 percent of the IT workforce may continue WFH after the GoI announcement. The sudden uptick in WFH users means that VPN becomes core technology to enable the continuation of the business. The biggest problem faced initially was mainly by the BPOs and KPOs that come under the OSP which has stringent policies in terms of data compliance. The initiative by the government is beneficial for the enterprises under OSP sector, however, this would only be successful when necessary security and risk management are in place. The bigger enterprises have already taken all the necessary measures to secure their workforce. The problem would now be faced by many MSMEs who would have focused on temporary or rudimentary resolution instead of long term resolution due to various reasons. But now that needs to change and SSL VPN settings help in maintaining network security regardless of the employee’s location which is ideal for WFH/WFA. The advantage of SSL VPN is it can be connected anytime, anywhere and Array has been named by Gartner as one of the VPN vendors in the Market Guide for VPN,” said Shibu Paul, Vice President – International Sales at Array Networks.

Traditional VPN solutions typically provide business continuity for a portion of the workforce.

What companies require is a purpose-built platform that ensures the following:

• Performance and user experience – The ability to achieve latency and throughput performance, and improve the end-user experience thus protecting end-user productivity.

• Scalability – The ability to scale to a large number of concurrent users on a single hardware platform without performance degradation.

• Security – The ability to provide not only encryption but also deep packet inspection and application-level filtering without adversely affecting overall system performance.

Enterprises need a centralized access solution that ties together all aspects of the user’s identity, device and network permissions, and can uniformly enforce policies, even for groups they do not control. At this point, it’s smart to look for the best ways to make something good come out of this situation and to create our silver linings. Enterprises need a VPN platform that can grow with you to meet the VPN requirements of tomorrow.