Remote Work Killer

Designed for a World That No Longer Exists

VPNs were invented in 1996. The internet was young. Everyone worked in offices. "Remote access" meant the occasional road warrior checking email from a hotel. The VPN was a neat trick: extend the office network to wherever you happened to be.

Fast forward to today. 60%+ of knowledge workers are remote or hybrid. The "road warrior" is now the entire company. And VPNs are buckling under a use case they were never designed to handle.

The Client Software Problem

VPN clients are universally despised. Every IT admin knows the support tickets:

• "The VPN client won't connect"
• "My VPN disconnects every 30 minutes"
• "The VPN client conflicts with my antivirus"
• "I can't install the VPN client on my personal device"
• "Which VPN profile do I use?"

The client is one more piece of software to install, update, troubleshoot, and support. On BYOD devices, it's often impossible to install. On managed devices, it's often the number one source of help desk tickets.

The "Always-On" Myth

Some organizations mandate always-on VPN connections. In theory, this ensures all traffic is secured. In practice:

• Battery life plummets on laptops
• Connection drops are constant on flaky Wi-Fi (coffee shops, airports, home networks)
• Users disable it because it's too slow for personal use
• IT spends more time enforcing the policy than benefiting from it

The BYOD Impossibility

Modern workforces use personal devices. Contractors bring their own laptops. Employees check Slack on their phones. VPNs assume you control the device, but you often don't.

Installing a full VPN client on an employee's personal phone? Good luck with that HR conversation. The result: personal devices access corporate resources without VPN protection, or they don't access them at all. Neither outcome is good.

The Global Workforce Problem

Your VPN concentrators are in Virginia and London. Your new hire is in Buenos Aires. Your contractor is in Mumbai. Your CEO is on vacation in Bali.

For all of them, the VPN means routing traffic across the planet to your data center. For the Buenos Aires employee, every click is a 200ms round trip. For the Bali CEO, it might be 400ms. That's not just slow — it makes real-time collaboration (video calls, shared documents, live editing) nearly impossible.

The Modern Alternative

Cloudflare Zero Trust was built for exactly this world:

• Clientless access for web apps: Users open a browser, authenticate, and they're in. No client to install, no profile to configure
• Lightweight agent for non-web traffic: When you need device-level routing, the WARP agent is fast, stable, and battery-friendly
• BYOD-friendly: Clientless access means any device with a browser can securely reach corporate apps
• Global by default: 300+ edge locations mean the user in Buenos Aires connects in under 50ms, same as the user in Virginia
• Invisible security: The best security is the kind users don't notice. No tunnel to establish, no client to restart, no profiles to choose

Your workforce gets to work from anywhere. Actually from anywhere.