The VPN
market had its glory days. Remember the days where you need to login to
VPN before you connect to your internal systems/apps within your
organization? I am not sure about you, but those days are long gone
atleast for me as I started using more and more apps on the cloud. This
makes me wonder – will cloud apps kill the VPN market?
When
a company starts using online applications, you don’t have anything
inside your firewall which eliminates the need for a VPN solution. We
are seeing all kinds of applications moving to the cloud reducing the
need for VPN. On-premise applications like MS Exchange (typically
deployed in DMZ) also offer web access which further eliminate the need
for VPN.
The trends for VPN don’t look bright either. 
This
trend, I should say is probably true for small and medium businesses
where they are open to using cloud applications. Enterprises have long
invested in on-premise systems and they probably are long way to get
rid of their VPN systems.
I have nothing
against VPNs. I myself have used and deployed different types of VPNs
(IPSec, SSL etc) and found them very useful when the content is within
the firewall. As I moved to the cloud, my VPN usage dropped
significantly.
Also, VPN is another app that
ties you down to ‘your device’ which doesn’t help either. With cloud
apps, you grow independent of the device which is a real convenicne.
What about you? Did your VPN usage come down due to cloud apps?
Software in Business. The Business of Software.
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I dont think the cloud will kill the VPN at all. The cloud negates the need for VPN in most cases, but it’s still useful, eg if you happen to have a very private app running on (eg) EC2, why not put a OpenVPN server infront – then you have (almost) unlimited bandwidth and processing, and it’s “secure”.
Personally, I think certificate-based SSL authentication is more likely to get a big foothold. SSL is nice and secure (duh!), and the addition of client certs allows for the authentication without it being public.
Now, if the browser makers could make it a load easier to grok for users….. 🙂
I think they will go away more, but not die… the same as cloud will not be 100% of the market ever….
Yeah. Some companies are using VPNCubed kind of perimeter security systems to “secure” their servers on the Cloud.
Maybe the VPN was already killed by the UTM (unified threat management)?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=UTM
my 2 cents
http://elastic-security.com/