Study Finds the Pandemic Did Little to Boost VPN Use

Fort Collins, Colo. – The abrupt shift to remote work triggered by pandemic shutdowns has had a surprisingly small effect on the the number of people using virtual public networks (VPN), according to research conducted by Virtual Intelligence Briefing (ViB) for DH2i®, a provider of IT infrastructure solutions.

The research, comparing pre-pandemic VPN use to use in 2022, predictably found VPNs are used primarily by individual users, typically employees, to link with an organization’s internal private network but use in 2022 increased just 2.4% compared to 2020.

“During 2020, the world experienced an unprecedented surge in the number of people working from home, a trend that has continued for many to present day. It would have therefore been reasonable to expect the VPN usage number to have climbed to closer to 100% in the most recent research,” said Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i. “The fact that it didn’t was unexpected and suggests that VPN remote user deployments may have reached a maximum saturation point.”

VPN hassles limit growth

The survey suggested that a primary driver for this trend was the pain now associated with VPNs. Prior to 2020, VPN usage was relatively low and therefore manageable. After the dramatic increase in remote VPN users came a commensurate increase in VPN-related pain – particularly around security. Other grievances included disaster recovery (DR) limitations, slow connection speeds, bandwidth constraints, configuration and overall management complexity, and cost.

As a result, respondents indicated that they have implemented or are planning to implement more viable VPN alternatives. Many reported that they are increasingly looking towards a software-defined perimeter (SDP) as a solution for their remote user, multi-site/multi-cloud, and IoT connectivity requirements. According to the report, since 2020, 18% of the respondents have implemented SDP, and an additional 39% are considering evaluating and deploying an SDP in the coming six to twelve months.

“As technology continues to evolve, traditional perimeter security methods like VPNs are struggling to keep up with the increasingly heterogeneous computing landscape. The basic castle moat functionality of VPNs, while useful in the past, is no longer sufficient to protect organizations in today’s complex digital environment,” concluded Boxley. “SDP’s Zero Trust network access tunnels offer application-level segmentation and invisibility to untrusted access, eliminating the risk of lateral network attacks that are common with VPNs and reducing the need for complicated firewall policies. This makes SDP the safer choice for organizations looking to move operations across different clouds and secure IoT devices.”

Other takeaways from the research include:

• Cisco remains the leading VPN brand with 53% of respondents currently using it, but its market share has decreased by 15% while its competitors, particularly F5, have grown their market share.
• The 2022 report shows a 10% decrease in VPN usage for site-to-site connectivity, while there was almost a 10% increase in VPN usage to connect to cloud-based services from an on-site location, suggesting a pandemic-related trend of accelerated use of cloud-based infrastructure.
• The use of microservices/containers increased by 42%, indicating that the future of application development and deployment will revolve around container technology, while the multi-cloud use case remained unchanged at 15%.

The results of which are detailed in a report titled, “Virtual Private Networks (VPN) Report, 2022.”