We are all too familiar with the articles and blogs about the scalability issues that impacted so many companies using VPN when everyone was forced to work from home. VPNs simply cannot scale efficiently and weren’t designed to support 80%-plus of the workforce going remote. The reliance on legacy VPNs at scale has resulted in chokepoints and degraded throughput, rationing VPN usage among employees and a persistent user experience issue with which we’re all too familiar.
So, what do we mean by concurrent access and how does it offer a superior experience? Appgate SDP has patented multi-tunneling technology. This allows simultaneous and direct connections (mTLS tunnels) from users to every location they are granted access to resources. This could be resources located in multiple on-premises sites and/or multi-cloud environments.
This multi-tunneling capability is what we call concurrent access. When compared to the traditional VPN concentrator architecture, concurrent access has three core advantages that drive productivity and agility:
- Streamlined user experience (UX) for increased productivity
- Better scale and performance for digital transformation
- Less complexity for enhanced security
UX & Productivity
It is said that “a happy employee is a productive employee.” Not being able to work efficiently due to VPN switching, or slow access, impacts the bottom line. This leads to frustration and complaints, which in turn leads to more help desk tickets and unhappy employees. No one likes a poor user experience in life or at the office. A simple, streamlined user experience provides easy and fast access to all resources needed to get one’s job done.
With Appgate SDP Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), connections are right at your employees’ fingertips, or a mouse click, with quick launch icons to most used resources. This saves time and eliminates the frustrations of finding apps or resources, which in turn keeps employees happy, productive and secure.
Scale & Performance
Digital transformation drives the enterprise’s need for agility to compete in today’s dynamic global market. Resources required to perform day-to-day work must be fast and highly available to remain competitive. This necessitates high performance and the ability to scale access on-demand for employees, contractors and third parties.
Concurrent access allows Appgate SDP’s architecture to be decentralized. No more 20-plus-year-old centralized architecture of VPN requiring massive hardware appliances at a single chokepoint to gain entry into the network. Connecting directly to where the resources reside eliminates the single point of entry and reduces bandwidth requirements and network congestion.
Appgate SDP is lightweight and can be deployed anywhere automatically or deployed via code for more developer-centric shops and is built to auto-scale for high- or low-demand periods.
It is linearly scalable with 93% throughput efficiency to handle hundreds of thousands of users adding less than 1ms of latency … a far cry when compared to the poor latency and appliance bandwidth issues associated with VPNs. Appgate SDP has been tested to outperform VPNs by as much as 10x. For more specifics on the scale and performance of Appgate SDP, read our whitepaper.
Complexity & Security
Directly connecting users simultaneously to every location where they are granted access to resources removes the administrative burden interconnecting locations with complex site-to-site VPN rules and expensive MPLS circuits to create a wide area network (WAN). Appgate SDP creates multiple user-based software-defined micro-perimeters between the user and each location where resources are protected. This allows administrator’s to focus on more important tasks by alleviating management overhead of traditional VPNs, simplifying security while reducing the potential for human error and providing a new level of agility.
In summary, Appgate SDP’s seamless concurrent access benefits:
- The users - It's easy to use, fast and it just works
- The administrators - It reduces complexity and lowers management burden with less user trouble tickets
- The enterprise - It improves scale and performance, reduces network congestion and increases agility
Providing seamless experiences with concurrent access is just one reason our customers decide to deploy Appgate SDP, a leading ZTNA solution. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to explore the following: