What Is Cloud VPN? Categories and Classifications

A cloud VPN offers a wide range of benefits for organizations, enabling their employees to work from anywhere at any time securely. Until recently, if an employee was working outside the office, they would have to use a remote VPN to access the information and services they needed from their organization’s servers.

But as organizations increasingly move to the cloud, it makes less sense for them to connect workers back to the VPN based in their physical office. Instead, users can now access cloud-based applications and data, a more convenient method that makes an organization’s architecture more agile, flexible, and scalable.

Cloud VPN services are globally accessible to users, enabling them to use applications, data, and files wherever they are in the world. The cloud VPN server makes services available to users through a cloud platform via the public internet. 

A VPN cloud service allows users to access private networks at any time and from anywhere securely. This approach helps provide a solid user experience. Employees can access networks and resources the same way they would if they were in the office.

The accessibility and security features that a cloud VPN provides offers a wide range of advantages and opportunities for organizations.

A cloud VPN enables organizations to easily view, manage, and monitor their search and web ranking, as well as advertisements. This allows them to monitor website and keyword performance internationally. Companies are able to connect to international servers, enabling them to view their ads across various key markets and monitor keyword performance in different countries.

Organizations can deliver different content to users based on where in the world they are located. A cloud VPN enables them to customize their website with images and text relevant to specific countries and localize the currency for product and checkout pages. This capability is crucial to increasing sales conversion rates, strengthening user experience, and establishing an organization as a leader ahead of its competition.

Popular applications and websites, such as Google, Facebook, Skype, and WhatsApp, are blocked in some countries, which can be hugely frustrating for end-users. A cloud VPN enables them to mask their location and bypass the local censorship laws that block access to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, social media sites, and more.

As the remote working trend grows, users increasingly use their personal phones and laptops for work purposes. Cloud VPN protocols allow employees to encrypt and secure their data and traffic, regardless of where they are located, which is vital to safely deploying bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies.

International organizations need to ensure their services are functioning efficiently around the world. Cloud VPN models enable an organization’s quality assurance team to easily amend their geolocation and check on the quality of their products in multiple markets worldwide.

A cloud VPN allows organizations to whitelist and segment their employees’ access to certain cloud resources. They can also automatically whitelist specific Internet Protocols (IPs) and assign static IP addresses. As a result, businesses can block potential threats and ensure only trusted individuals can access data, files, networks, or systems.

Two core categories of VPN configurations can be used to deploy VPNs over public networks.

A site-to-site VPN configuration enables information to be sent securely across multiple local-area networks (LANs) to multiple office networks. The process routes packets over a secure VPN tunnel between two routers or gateway devices. As a result, two private networks, or sites, can share data across an insecure network without information being intercepted by an unauthorized user.

Site-to-site VPNs increase flexibility and scalability because the gateway VPN only has to support IPsec functionality. This minimizes installation and management costs, frees up memory consumption, and increases processing speed. However, it can increase computing power utilization, which can decrease communication speed.

A site-to-cloud configuration, or secure client-to-gateway connection, enables a client from an insecure remote location to access internal data located outside an organization’s LAN. A user needs to connect to the VPN to obtain secure access to the LAN, which can typically be managed by configuring a device like a router or a computer operating system. This configuration is often utilized by access VPNs or extranet VPNs.

The following cloud VPN topologies relate to HA VPN classifications.

The two-peer VPN devices topology involves a gateway connecting to two peer devices, each of which has its own interface and external IP address. If a gateway is hardware-based, a second gateway enables it to offer failover and redundancy. This protects an organization against failures and allows them to take a gateway offline to carry out scheduled maintenance or software upgrades.

This topology involves a single gateway connecting to a peer device with two external IP addresses. The gateway uses two VPN tunnels connecting to the peer device’s external IP addresses.

In this option, the gateway connects to one peer device with one external IP address. It also uses two tunnels, both of which connect to one IP address.

Fortinet helps organizations secure their cloud VPN through high-performance encryption and decryption. The FortiGate high-speed crypto VPN enables organizations to securely transport large volumes of information and quickly process data without affecting network security. Meanwhile, FortiClient uses real-time scanning to spot vulnerabilities, protect endpoints from malware, and uses sandbox intelligence to discover and prevent zero-day threats. In this way, an organization can guarantee its VPN solution is fully secure from every angle.

A cloud VPN securely connects users using an Internet Protocol security (IPsec) VPN connection.

A cloud VPN offers a wide range of benefits for organizations, enabling their employees to work from anywhere at any time securely.

Cloud VPN services enable organizations to bolster networks on the public cloud with accessibility, compliance, and security measures.