15 May 5 Reasons to Protect Your VPN With MFA
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are a popular method for providing remote access to internal applications. A VPN connection creates a private, encrypted tunnel for an off-site user to connect to applications in a corporate data center. However, there is still a security risk for unprotected VPN connections that could leave users exposed to data breaches if those credentials are stolen. Here are 5 reasons MFA can help protect your VPN against users’ credentials from being stolen.
- Protect Against Credential Theft
With stolen credentials, an attacker can access the corporate network over the VPN to try to gain higher privileges to other systems, applications, and servers. An attacker could potentially install malware on internal systems to gain backdoor access to the network. Layering secure MFA on top of a VPN defends against stolen credentials. MFA verifies the identity of all users with a second factor before granting access to corporate applications.
- Achieve Regulatory Compliance
Securing VPN access is a data regulatory compliance requirement, and MFA helps achieve compliance. Adding MFA with your VPN deployment instantly reduces the risk of a data breach while helping to meet compliance requirements.
- Enable Consistent Access Security
While VPN delivers remote access to on-premises applications, many organizations are moving workloads to the cloud. Businesses that have hybrid approaches can introduce inconsistency into how users access applications by creating different processes for on-premises and the cloud. MFA ensures consistent access security across on-premises and cloud apps, meaning the process for logging into the VPN is the same as the process to log into email, file sharing, collaboration, or any other applications in the cloud.
- Gain Visibility Into All Devices
Some MFA solutions can provide insights into the devices accessing all applications, including your VPN deployment. You can see the security posture of all user devices, such as laptops, desktops, and mobile devices.
- Enforce Access Security Policies
Certain MFA solutions offer the ability to enforce security policies based on user and device risk. For example, you can apply a security policy for VPNs to allow access to only from specific locations, such as the U.S., and from devices that have up-to-date software. This gives you a higher level of assurance before you grant a user or their device access to applications.
Contact our team to learn how we can protect your VPN with MFA.