A business VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a secure, encrypted connection established over the internet between an employee’s device and the company’s internal network. This secure tunnel ensures that data transmitted between the employee and the company’s network is protected from eavesdropping, interception, and unauthorized access.
Business VPNs are commonly used to allow employees to securely access corporate resources especially when working remotely or from unsecured public networks, such as:
Despite the advantages, some remote employees have stumbled into connectivity problems and felt the frustration that ensues. Preventing this is a key component to ensuring VPN adoption and best practices.
In practice, encryption and decryption usually end up increasing the size of data packets by a small but noticeable amount. Though it’s dependent on the specific type of encryption protocol – and the type of internet traffic – it’s normal for packets to increase in size by around 10%.
Alongside each data packet being slightly larger, corporate network startup overhead can increase as well, driven by initial connection processes such as the TLS handshake.
As a result, business network speeds that begin to tank can sometimes benefit from greater amounts of bandwidth. By removing this bottleneck, it’s possible to achieve high-speed internet even with a business VPN.
Server load and latency are directly correlated with one another: connecting to a VPN adds another layer of risk to the question of server load. Since VPN servers are integral to how rapidly a provider can handle end-user requests, server overload can create unexpected and sudden spikes in latency.
This process is all too common for users who rely on free and discount VPN services.
Split tunneling allows non-critical traffic to bypass the VPN tunnel, reducing the volume of data that needs to be encrypted and routed via distant VPN servers. By sending only necessary traffic through the VPN tunnel, split tunneling can reduce congestion on corporate internet and therefore speed up employee internet connection.
Note, however, that split tunneling comes with some security risks. To mitigate this, look into split tunneling with a SASE solution; this can offer a sweet spot between faster web traffic, while leveraging cloud-based security protections to keep decrypted traffic safe.
This can also remove the heavy demands of large firewalls – and allows an enterprise to get away with a lower-bandwidth ISP. Ultimately, organizations must carefully weigh these advantages against the necessary security considerations it ensues.
VPNs increase latency by introducing extra travel time for data packets. Consider a worst-case scenario where a remote employee in Europe relies on a Texas-based VPN service: every time their device sends or receives a data packet, it needs to traverse the thousands of miles of cable to Texas, get decrypted, forwarded to the web server, and then re-encrypted and sent back to the EU.
While an extreme example, this perfectly illuminates an instance of the trombone effect: where data takes an incredibly inefficient route to and from an otherwise nearby database. To put some numbers to it, latency is thought to increase by up to 300% for servers over 500 miles away from the end-user.
To prevent this, look for a VPN with adequate Points of Presence (PoPs).
This way, data packets aren’t forced to traverse the length of your country, and can instead be streamlined to precisely where your employees are working from.
Continuously monitoring server load across multiple VPN servers allows a load balancing system to evenly distribute connection requests. This prevents any single server from becoming overwhelmed – which could lead to massive spikes of latency for connected users.
When taking a longer-term view of your VPN’s latency and its resultant impacts on employee efficiency, it could be worth your time to analyze server load trends. This allows IT teams to anticipate periods of peak usage, and proactively scale bandwidth and infrastructure to stop latency spikes.
Application-aware traffic management allows for engineers to prioritize critical applications and juggle bandwidth resources accordingly. Part of this can entail deliberate bandwidth throttling for applications that needlessly hog bandwidth – especially during peak hours.
Utilizing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) allows this to be automated by identifying and classifying the different types of application traffic.
From this, you can develop policies based on categories to control bandwidth allocation for specific apps. For a more universal approach, consider per-IP address controls, which can segment bandwidth usage into individual any mobile devices and users.
Perimeter81’s VPN replacement avoids the other traps of VPNs: rather than a single protocol applied across all of your critical resources, Perimeter 81 lets you deploy a range of VPN protocols like IPSec and WireGuard for different resources and users.
Optimize every user’s connection with a single solution with global PoPs, and cut messy tool sprawl for good.