VPN is Here to Stay
IT teams will undoubtedly run into unprecedented challenges in 2023. But the importance of reliable VPN performance is one priority that will remain unchanged.
A new year has begun, but digital transformation in today’s workforce has resulted in changes that carried over into 2022 and will likely continue in 2023 and beyond. Organizations have implemented tools to improve hybrid working conditions and reevaluated their investments to find the best quality and fit. Buzzwords like “efficiency,” “user experience,” and “productivity” were frontrunners in 2022 as companies adapted to the “new normal.” While 2023 is a new beginning, it is expected to share similar concerns.
With most big changes, there are typically the trailblazers and early adopters, paving and shaping the way for others to follow suit. But with COVID-19, everyone had to respond rapidly, and even laggards were hurriedly implementing new technology and avant-garde workplace policies. As the dust settled, many organizations used 2022 as a “rebuilding” year for strategic evaluation to decide what was working and what needed to change. If there is one New Year’s resolution we could guess that companies in every industry share; it would be to reduce IT complexity – and cost, of course, but that’s true every year. One thing is for certain – regardless of what each new year brings, VPN is here to stay.
It is estimated that as of 2022, about 1.2 billion internet users around the world are using a VPN. VPN connectivity provides the hybrid workforce with the necessary access to company resources from any working environment. Dependance on VPN presents a slew of performance management challenges to IT teams in the modern-day workforce:
Continuous connectivity – High gateway traffic volumes have increased the need for traffic monitoring as the work-from-anywhere model continues. Regardless of infrastructure or work environment, seamless VPN connectivity, gateway capacity, and WAN bandwidth availability is crucial to business operations.
Application availability - The workforce relies heavily on mission-critical applications like Cisco Webex, Salesforce, and Microsoft Office365 to do their jobs on a daily basis. Performance of applications in the data center is critical to keeping businesses running. Application degradations can have a significant negative impact on businesses – especially when left unresolved for extended periods of time.
Maintaining visibility - Overseeing the operational efficiency of the disperse hybrid workforce is no small feat. Decreasing mean time to knowledge (MTTK) is critical to reduce troubleshooting time, identify true root cause of service issues, and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).
User experience and productivity – Many of us can agree – nothing ruins your morning like logging into your laptop to begin the remote workday and running into VPN connectivity issues. Smooth operations start with VPN login, which affects user satisfaction and workforce productivity and, ultimately, the bottom line for businesses.
NETSCOUT solutions help assure VPN access, performance, and availability. With nGenius Enterprise Performance Management, companies can monitor, trend, and troubleshoot VPN-related issues efficiently regardless of work environment.
The new year will undoubtedly bring new challenges for IT teams to tackle. But in light of these new challenges, some things may never change. We’ll all be mistakenly writing “2022” for the next few months, and we’ll all be logging onto our VPN to make sure work gets done – no matter what year it is.
Learn more about how NETSCOUT solutions help manage VPN performance.