Apcela Accelerates Expansion of Cisco, Palo Alto VPNs to Support COVID-19 Remote Workers

RESTON, Va., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Apcela, a leader in software-defined, cloudoptimized networks, today announced the availability of VPN services to augment secure remote worker access for enterprises with both on-premises and cloud application access needs. A virtual private network (VPN) extends an enterprise's private network across a public network, such as the Internet, and enables users to securely send and receive data between their device and an application hosted in an enterprise datacenter or in the cloud.

• The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to millions of employees suddenly needing to work remotely from home. This has caused unanticipated stress on enterprise networking and security environments at a staggering rate and level.
• VPN usage has grown by as much as 53% in the US and 112% in Europe, and this number is expected to continue increasing (Atlas).

According to Kunal Thakkar, Head of Solutions Engineering at Apcela, "Most enterprises have engineered their remote access platforms to support 20-30% of the workforce on any given day. Now with 70% or more of their users working remotely, IT managers are scrambling to expand capacity."

Both Cisco and Palo Alto have announced free and expanded licensing for their VPN clients, AnyConnect and GlobalProtect. While this helps, availability of additional licenses does not automatically translate to augmentation in the underlying physical VPN infrastructure, or the Internet capacity. And hence, the enterprises are still scrambling to expand their network capacity and datacenter side terminating appliances to support the increased demand.

Apcela's Arcus Secure platform alleviates these datacenter constraints, by enabling enterprises to extend their current VPN and security environment scalably, on demand. It also allows for secure split tunneling, by service chaining other enterprise security tools such as Secure Web Gateways and Data Loss Prevention platforms with the VPN service. Split tunneling is the ability to separate the users traffic, routing datacenter bound traffic separately from cloud application traffic such as that destined for Microsoft O365.

Leveraging Apcela's Arcus Platform enables an enterprise to distribute security to the edge. Utilizing 60+ geographically distributed AppHubs across Apcela's high performance global network, Arcus Secure enables network security teams to extend the security stack that is traditionally anchored at the datacenter toward the cloud. The result is an operationally manageable environment that provides a multi-cloud on-ramp to dozens of cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and Google Cloud.

"The combination of these elements, managed under one Apcela umbrella, simplifies IT managers ability to rapidly expand remote VPN access, and gives enterprises the peace of mind that their operations can continue at scale, even without access to a traditional office environment," says Thakkar. "Never before have enterprises needed to rely so heavily on these VPN technologies, but well after we get through the current pandemic, the future is increasingly remote and in the cloud."

Apcela's multi-tenant VPN architecture also allows customers to diversify, distribute, and load balance their VPN traffic, mitigating single point of failure and enhancing the speed to connect.

"Virtualization is the only way to keep up," Thakkar continues. "As the need continues to extend, enterprises are also challenged with logistical issues associated with the supply chain. This Apcela service simply augments the enterprise's existing VPN environment as opposed to building out new datacenter capacity, causing additional strain on resources and impacting timelines."

About Apcela
Apcela provides software-defined, cloud optimized networks for the digitally transforming enterprise. Delivered as a service, we enable enterprises to easily deploy and operate a software-defined network and security architecture that was built for a multi-cloud world.
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Media Contact:
Hannah Swanson
Apcela
[email protected]
703-788-9695

Note: AnyConnect and GlobalProtect are trademarks of Cisco and Palo Alto.

SOURCE Apcela