The COVID-19 outbreak has brought businesses around the globe to their knees. To survive, organizations across verticals are rolling out work-from-home policies. And for effective remote working, it’s imperative to employ VPN connections, as they serve as a conduit for workers to access business-critical data remotely.
But when valuable VPN bandwidth is consumed by trivial activities, business-critical applications can run on only meager bandwidth, which translates to lost productivity. To ensure uninterrupted remote working, organizations must be able to gauge VPN bandwidth consumption.
Proper VPN bandwidth can make or break a business
Certain information and services are only accessible inside company premises; accessing them remotely through a secure VPN connection is a must. After the initial deployment of VPN connections, some businesses encounter technical difficulties from the server and client side. A major bottleneck is the mismanagement and improper forecasting of VPN bandwidth capacity. Inadequate VPN bandwidth can lead to dire consequences for businesses, including everything from impaired services to operational disasters.
How can mismanaged VPN bandwidth impact remote work?
The repercussions businesses can experience from mismanaged VPN bandwidth include:
- Business-critical applications are impeded, resulting in reduced productivity.
- Substandard customer service is provided, leading to a poor end-user experience.
- Slow file sharing and lags in video conferences occur, resulting in poor collaboration within and across teams.
- Poor VPN bandwidth capacity forecasting causes IT costs to increase.
- Failure to meet service-level agreements could lead to penalties.
Capabilities you need for effective VPN bandwidth monitoring and forecasting
Proactive monitoring of the following factors can help keep your VPN bandwidth in check:
- IPs and their VPN bandwidth consumption: Inspecting all the IPs utilizing VPNs, as well as their individual bandwidth consumption, is imperative. This helps you zero in on IPs that consume inordinate levels of bandwidth and restrict their consumption in the future.
- Destinations your VPN IPs land on: Viewing the destinations and URLs your VPN clients visit is vital. This helps you classify URLs as business-critical and non-critical. Access to non-critical URLs can be blocked using a blacklist to save valuable bandwidth.
- VPN bandwidth trends: Studying VPN bandwidth trends helps you anticipate consumption levels during various parts of the day, and helps you plan bandwidth capacity needs.
- Active VPN sessions and peak hour utilization: Keeping tabs on the number of active VPN sessions and peak hour utilization helps you with VPN capacity forecasting and planning. Obtaining stats on VPN bandwidth demand is useful for calculating further scalability.
Quickly adapting to an ever-changing environment is important for survival. Organizations need a VPN monitoring solution that helps network administrators dynamically plan, monitor, and manage their VPN infrastructure.
How Firewall Analyzer can help combat bandwidth anomalies
ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer helps network administrators gain complete visibility over their VPN traffic and firewall logs. Firewall Analyzer generates VPN reports that help in answering the following questions.
- Who logged into a VPN, and how many VPN logins occur every day?
- How many VPN login attempts failed?
- How many live VPN user sessions are currently running?
- What are the top VPN sessions in terms of length?
- How much bandwidth does each user consume?
- What protocols were used to access VPNs?
- What are the VPN usage trends?
- Does VPN usage increase during a specific day or hour?
- Which VPN groups are consuming the most traffic?
With these reports, network administrators can easily plan an efficient VPN infrastructure that provides the ideal platform for remote employees to work without any hassle. A well-planned VPN infrastructure enables your company to retain its productivity and gain a competitive edge in this volatile marketplace. Download a 30-day free trial of Firewall Analyzer to start efficiently monitoring your VPN infrastructure.
** Optrics Inc. is a ManageEngine partner
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