Implementing Zero Trust Security

In the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, it has now long been clear that many companies are likely to remember the virus as beneficial to their own business. VPN solution vendors definitely fall into this category: When home office and teleworking mutated from the exception to the rule in many companies, existing VPN solutions became substantially more in-demand. Hardly anyone expected the load on the VPN gateways to explode overnight. The large network manufacturers were happy to help out their customers as many admins purchased more powerful systems for OpenVPN (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Homegrown VPN solutions, such as this one based on OpenVPN, are no longer suitable for state-of-art security. © KIT

But do VPNs really solve the problem of network security? Many experts are not so sure. Implicitly, all parties involved with VPNs start from the following premise: There is a difference between the internal and the external network, and it is safe to treat internal clients differently from external clients. VPNs are regularly used specifically because admins do not want certain services to be accessible from the Internet at all. In many companies, VPNs form part of a security architecture that has grown organically over many years. Because security requirements have increased continuously over the past two decades, companies have invested more and more money in private networks and cut off more and more services from the outside world.

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