Enterprise VPNs Buyers’ Guide 2024

An Enterprise VPN (Virtual Private Network) protects your organization’s data from being accessed and enables secure remote access for employees. It’s important for organizations to have a VPN in place to prevent malicious threat actors from accessing data, and to secure your corporate network.

In this buyers guide, we’ll cover:

• Types of VPNs
• The best Enterprise VPN vendors 
• Features checklist 
• Our Recommendations
• Future trends

Why VPNs Matters: VPNs ensure that data cannot be accessed when in transit, helping to protect your organization against costly data breaches.

• When remote work is a factor in causing a data breach, the average cost per breach is $173,074 higher (IBM)
• The global VPN market is worth $44.6 billion (Research and Markets)
• The global VPN market is predicted to grow to $87.1 billion by 2027 (StrategyR)

Types of VPN: Common methods and technologies used in the VPN industry include the following:

• Remote Access VPNs: Allows users to securely connect to corporate networks from any location.
  • This is ideal for remote workers accessing company resources over the internet
• Site-to-Site VPNs: Connect entire networks to each other over the internet, often used for connecting branch offices to the main corporate network. This facilitates communication and resource sharing between different office locations.
• SSL/TLS VPNs: Uses SSL/TLS protocols for form secure connection between users and the VPN server.
  • Often used to web-based applications and access via a web browser.
• IPsec VPNs: Utilizes the IPsec protocol suite to secure IP communications by encrypting and authenticating each IP packet. 
  • This is typically used for both remote access and site-to-site VPNs.

On-Premises Deployment, Cloud-Based Deployment, Hybrid Deployment, and Virtual Appliance Deployment gives organizations choice and flexibility. It allow them to adapt processes based on specific needs, resources, and security requirements. 

The Best Enterprise VPN Providers: We’ve put together a shortlist of the top enterprise VPN solutions:

• Top 10 Enterprise VPN Solutions
  • Twingate
  • NordLayer
  • Cisco AnyConnect
  • Citrix Gateway
  • Fortinet FortiClient

See also our buyers’ guides covering alternative options for VPN solutions:

• The Top 7 Desktop VPNs
• The Top 7 Affordable VPNs

Features Checklist: When choosing an Enterprise VPN, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

• Encryption: Protocols like AES-256 provides robust data security ensuring that sensitive information is protected against interception or tampering. This helps to maintains its confidentiality and integrity.
• Centralized management: This makes it easier for IT administrators to manage users access, monitor usage, and reinforce security policies from a single interface.
• Multi-Factor Authentication: This enhances security by adding an extra barrier against unauthorized access, helping to ensure that only authorized users can connect to the VPN.
• Management Tools: It should be easy for administrators to effectively monitor, configure, and control VPN usage and policies. 
• Split Tunnelling: This feature allows users to route some of their internet traffic through the VPN, while other traffic flows directly to the internet, thereby optimizing network performance and bandwidth usage by reducing the load on the VPN server.
• Automatic Kill Switch: This a security feature that will disconnect a user’s device from the internet immediately if the VPN connection were to drop, preventing data from being exposed to the internet without VPN protection. 

Our Recommendations: Our recommendations for selecting the best enterprise VPN for you is to prioritize the following capabilities:

• Scalability: Ensuring your VPN can accommodate growing user numbers and increased data traffic without compromising performance is essential. This is particularly important for large enterprises that anticipate periods of growth or fluctuation.
• Compatibility: A good enterprise VPN should be compatible with a variety of operating systems and devices, including Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows (for both mobile and desktop devices).
• Compliance: Organizations, particularly those in regulated industries, need to be mindful of compliance rulings. It is important to ensure that any enterprise VPN you consider is compliance focused.
• Seamless Integration: Your Enterprise VPN should be able to integrate seamlessly with the IT infrastructure that is already in place, for streamlined operations and reduced deployment complexity.
• Performance: High performance (high speed connection and minimal latency) will ensure that productivity is maintained.

Future Trends: Some of the latest trends and advancements in the VPN space include:

• Evolving security paradigms that prioritize trust verification at every stage.
• Cutting edge encryption to future proof corporate networks against emerging threats.
• Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), which is an evolution of traditional VPNs that emphasises adaptive threat detection by incorporating AI and ML technologies to enhance detection and response capabilities.
  • By 2025, up to 70% of remote access deployments will be based on ZTNA rather than VPNs (Gartner)

Further Reading:

• How To Choose The Best VPN App For Your Business
• VPN Vs. ZTNA: What’s The Difference?