Cookie Settings
Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Other cookies are those that are being identified and have not been classified into any category as yet.

No cookies to display.

3 doors

Why your VPN is slow: the case of the work-at-home streaming


The VPN. Its like the leaky, clanky dirty boiler room of the corporate world. (Or is that Excel?). No one loves it, no one knows how to not have it.

Today many of you were working from home via the VPN. More than usual. And it was not a speedy experience. A lot of that is due to the inherent properties of a VPN (its a stateful device, scaling by user rather than by bandwidth). But, you may not be aware, there is another cause: you. Yes you. When you are using the VPN all your traffic (likely) goes through it. Listening to spotify? Watching YouTube? Skyping that team member? Even though the endpoint is not inside your corporate network, the nature of a VPN is that it usually takes all traffic.

The ‘split-horizon’ VPN (sometimes called the split-tunnel) is an alternative. Its not necessarily a good alternative, merely different. You see, when you set up a VPN you are presenting with two fairly tough choices: make things work (and be slow), or allow things to be efficient (but maybe break).

Consider, you have a small home network. A PC. A printer. A Chromecast. You have the PC going, you print something over the network, you are streaming YouTube to the Chromecast, all is good. Then you start your corporate network, those things break. This is because the VPN takes all traffic, and your PC can no longer reach local things. Your YouTube now streams from the Internet to your corporate network and then to your house over the VPN. Hmm, what’s the alternative? Well. imagine the same house. The subnet allocated by that trusty home router is 192.168.0.0/24. But, your corporate IT people use that for the Wiki. If you enable split-horizon you can’t edit the Wiki. Argh.

So what do you do? You send an email to all your co-workers reminding them not to use spotify/youtube/… while on the VPN? You ask your IT team to enable split-horizon and argue about security and reliability? Or you work on getting these applications available, Zero Trust style, directly on the Internet, and toss the VPN to the curb? Door number three sounds pretty sweet if you ask me.