In an effort to further support their employees working from home (opens in new tab), Organizations are migrating their VPN (opens in new tab) services to the cloud according to new research from NetMotion (opens in new tab).
To compile its new “The Journey to SASE (opens in new tab)” report, the firm surveyed 750 leaders working in IT, security and networking across five geographical markets and eight sectors. Respondents shared their insights, familiarity and experience with Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and other network security topics.
- We've built a list of the best business VPN (opens in new tab) solutions around
- These are the best Windows 10 VPN (opens in new tab) services on the market
- Also check out our roundup of the best Mac VPN (opens in new tab)
SASE (opens in new tab) is a term that was first coined by Gartner in a study (opens in new tab) published during 2019 and while it may be tempting to think of it as a product category like a firewall (opens in new tab), it's more like a framework or philosophy. SASE encompasses a wide range of technologies that are delivered as a service and are designed to support organizations' secure access (opens in new tab) needs.
Migrating to a cloud VPN
According to NetMotion's study, over half (54%) of organizations have already moved their VPN services from on-premise to the cloud and this includes VPN products hosted as SaaS (opens in new tab) offerings or those managed in private clouds such as Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab) or AWS (opens in new tab).
Unlike traditional VPN services, a cloud VPN (opens in new tab) is not set up and maintained on a company server. Instead the daily operation of an organization's VPN is outsourced to a 'virtual private network as a service' (VPNaas (opens in new tab)). Cloud VPNs are designed to be compatible with a wide variety of cloud computing (opens in new tab) applications and offer a higher level of security.
When it comes to the countries where organizations are making the switch to cloud VPNs, Australian (62%) and American (60) organizations are leading the charge while Japanese (46%), British (50%) and German (52%) businesses are slower to migrate.
At the same time though, government and public safety bodies are also more apprehensive about adopting cloud-hosted VPN products with only 29 percent of organizations in these sectors currently using a cloud VPN. Organizations in the healthcare (72%), manufacturing (68%) and legal (56%) fields are the most likely to be utilizing a cloud VPN.
- We've also featured the best proxy (opens in new tab)