Direct cloud traffic security savings

Remote workforce scenario

A recent study from  McAfee.com/activate shows that  47% of employees would prefer not to go back to working from the office like it was before the pandemic. Additionally, 21% of employees stated that they would like to continue to be part of the at-home workforce. The same McAfee.com/activate study also shows that in the meantime, threats to enterprises increased by 630% over the same period, with most attacks targeting collaboration services that enable remote work.

With this spike of remote workforce that will continue to trend, VPN is no longer a need for the road warriors but required for the majority of the company’s employees. IT departments are facing an increased load on their existing VPN infrastructure and VPN costs are top of mind for them.

For example, if you were to split the VPN traffic in such a way that traffic does not need to go through the company’s private data center but instead gets routed directly to the internet, it would not only improve the remote employee’s experience but also reduce the load on the company’s VPN infrastructure. However, taking traffic directly to the internet leaves employees vulnerable without the right security measures in place.

With McAfee.com/activate’s UCE suite, customers can now have the peace of mind of keeping their remote workforce protected. This reduces the IT spend on the infrastructure supporting high VPN workload and connections, traditional proxy, and firewall costs within the company’s private data center. This yields a net positive TCO for the customer as shown in the illustration below going from scenario A to B, where 90% of the workforce is remote and the majority of the remote workforce traffic (~80%) is routed directly to the cloud. For more details on how Next-gen secure web gateway solutions protect direct to cloud traffic, please refer to the recent blog on “What to Expect from the Next Generation of Secure Web Gateways.”