The architecture and security needs of the modern hybrid enterprise are far beyond the configuration capabilities of today’s VPNs. Originally, VPNs were not designed to be a secure way to access networks. They were designed, long before the days of ransomware, man-in-the-middle attacks, and phishing – solely to connect the outside world to your inside network.

For instance, VPNs were never meant to specialize in the in-depth inspection of your traffic that is so vital to keeping your security posture strong today. And while some have added security measures that go beyond just username and password credentials, the tradeoff is that those security capabilities also create a drastic drag on a VPN’s throughput.

The heavy connection a VPN uses requires significant bandwidth – and bandwidth can be a limited resource, especially at a time when entire workforces around the globe are logging in remotely. That’s because VPNs deal with connectivity solely at the network level, relying on standard communications as if your users were still on the network sitting in their offices.

As we are seeing now, when you change your remote workflow coming in through a VPN from 500 to 5,000 employees, that creates a significant bottleneck. All the messages that circulate through your network, all the overhead operations of security measures like group policy, software updates, and patches, all the things that used to be controlled locally – they are all now part of the communication layer flowing through the VPNs and through your external communications infrastructure.

Normally, your internal bandwidth is much more than your external bandwidth, so this is going to place extraordinary pressure on your organization, with pervasive performance issues very likely to develop.

Most of that information is not useful to a remote business user, and worse, it chews up a tremendous amount of your infrastructure’s bandwidth along the way. Meanwhile, hackers find the open port, exploit it by using valid credentials (either through phishing attacks or by purchasing them on the Dark Web), and gain access to your infrastructure. Then – BANG – it’s all over. They can quickly and easily move laterally across all your network resources.

Total Access Control (TAC) takes a different approach. Instead of working at the network level – which requires sending all your traffic back and forth across the Internet – TAC manages all the session and network interactions for your end users, without exposing your network on a wide basis to hackers.

All that transverses the internet with TAC is an optimized flow of screen traffic and minimal overhead. Even these exponentially smaller traffic flows are compressed and optimized through advanced algorithms and caching. The result is a much faster user experience with dramatically lower overhead than traditional VPNs, as well as reduced loads on application servers.