Beyond VPNs: introducing the AppWAN

Are VPNs on their way out? Here’s what NetFoundry CEO Galeal Zino told us:

“The demand for high-performance, secure connectivity is at an all-time high as businesses embrace and deploy modern cloud applications. However, the perimeter-based security provided by VPNs is lacking. VPNs aren’t built to protect corporate assets from insider threats, including employees who have already been logged into the network. The performance and security challenges of traditional VPNs are well documented.

“The bottom line is that VPNs don’t meet today’s infrastructure and application requirements. They had their heyday in 1998 as the only secure way to do transactions across the widening internet and spiralling extranets. But they fail at modern needs like connectivity performance, cloud networking, IoT network awareness and application availability. There’s no VPN that can offer direct application support: VPNs can only deliver one-to-one connectivity, not the multi-edge to multi-application-specific cloud overlay needed for today’s application environment.

“The answer is application-specific technology like AppWANs – unique private network sessions established from a client directly to the specific IP address, port and protocol of a service or application. No two clients use the same carrier tunnel, and they may use different pathways, even from the same physical location: each client-to-application connection is unique.

“AppWANs bring centralised, customised security to any device, any user and most importantly, any application. The AppWAN approach is more flexible and secure, and supports all cloud and IoT applications, based on whatever policies and rules administrators choose to configure. Instead of merely delivering network access, like a VPN, AppWANs deliver encryption and zero-trust security directly to the application via the cloud.”