If you own an enterprise or are an IT administrator, you might know Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that help safeguard your network and protect its sensitive data against malicious entities.
They’re commonly built on IPsec—which helps ensure secure communication over a VPN. While VPNs allow you to access a private network and its resources and share private information via public or open internet from a remote location, IPsec is a suite of protocols that establishes a mutual connection between computers at the start of the communication to negotiate cryptographic keys during the communication.
You’ll require a VPN Passthrough if your organisation uses an older protocol like PPTP or IPsec.
In this article, we learn what VPN Passthrough and IPsec Passthrough are, whether they’re still relevant, and an excellent VPN alternative for your enterprise’s network security and secure remote access. Let’s go!
Understanding VPN Passthrough
A VPN Passthrough is nothing but a router feature that establishes an outbound VPN connection with the device connected to your router. An outbound connection is nothing but a connection from your remote location (home or work) to the public internet.
It helps connect two secure networks over the internet and allows the VPN traffic to pass through the router easily—hence the name VPN Passthrough.
While most routers enable VPN Passthrough by default, you can choose to disable it through your router’s management interface.
Now, let’s understand IPsec Passthrough.
Understanding IPsec Passthrough
Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a suite of protocols that helps encrypt sensitive data and data packets and establish secure connections. It’s embedded in the network itself.
It helps IPsec tunnels to pass through the router and uses Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) to enable point-to-point sessions at the Layer 2 level through the internet. One of its significant and major benefits is that it helps securely create and maintain IP connections over routers that require NAT.
However, enabling IPsec Passthrough passes the vulnerabilities present in the IP layer in the remote network to the corporate network through your IPsec tunnel. Moreover, firewall restrictions also block your traffic—which can be even a bigger issue if you use outdated routers.
So, with this outdated VPN Passthrough solution, what other alternatives to the VPN technology you can use for your enterprise network? The answer is Zero Trust VPN. Let’s find out more.
Zero Trust: An Excellent Alternative to VPN
The outdated VPN technology isn’t built to meet the needs of your modern enterprise and brings several demerits—including excessive implicit trust, larger attack surface, management and scalability complexity, and performance lags and degradation.
Here are the benefits of the Zero Trust Security solution over traditional VPNs:
- Enforces robust access policies to ensure the right devices access the right data.
- Manages user identification and verification to provide the least privileged access.
- Provides access to specific applications the users need instead of the entire network.
- Prevents lateral movement and securely extends security for remote workforces.
- Provides secure single-click access to offer a seamless user experience.
- Reduce redundant VPN-based security complexities with unified, secure access.
- Ensures a privacy-first approach to ensure only you can access your network traffic.
Conclusion
VPNs no longer cater to the large-scale remote workplace needs and bring several security risks and hamper the user experience.
Zero Trust, on the contrary, promotes the principle of “Never Trust, Always Verify” to enhance network security, performance, and user trust. So, check out InstaSafe VPN alternative services for your enterprise security and upgrade your security posture with a cloud-ready Zero Trust Security solution.