Painfully Slow Speeds

The VPN Speed Tax

Every organization that runs a VPN knows the drill. Monday morning, the entire workforce connects, and suddenly everything crawls. Video calls stutter. File downloads creep. SaaS apps that were snappy at home now feel like they're running on dial-up.

This isn't a bug — it's by design.

How VPNs Create Bottlenecks

Traditional VPNs work by creating an encrypted tunnel between a user's device and a VPN concentrator, usually sitting in a corporate data center. All traffic — or at least all corporate traffic — flows through this tunnel.

That means a user in Tokyo accessing a cloud app hosted in Singapore first sends their traffic to a data center in Virginia. The packet crosses the Pacific, hits the concentrator, gets decrypted, re-encrypted, and sent back across the Pacific to Singapore. Round trip? Easily 400ms+ added latency.

Now multiply that by every employee, every app, every request. Your VPN concentrator becomes the world's most expensive bottleneck.

The Monday Morning Meltdown

VPN concentrators have finite capacity. Most organizations size them for "average" concurrent connections, not peak. So when everyone logs in at 9 AM, the concentrator hits its throughput ceiling. Connections queue. Some get dropped. IT gets flooded with tickets.

The typical enterprise VPN concentrator handles 1,000-5,000 concurrent sessions. A mid-size company can blow through that on a normal Tuesday, let alone during an all-hands week.

Split Tunneling: A Band-Aid That Creates New Problems

The usual "fix" is split tunneling — routing only corporate traffic through the VPN and letting everything else go direct. But this creates a security blind spot. That "non-corporate" traffic? It's now completely uninspected. Malware, data exfiltration, phishing — all invisible to your security team.

You're trading speed for security. That's not a trade-off; it's a surrender.

The Modern Alternative

Cloudflare Access eliminates the hub-and-spoke model entirely. Instead of routing traffic through a single choke point, each connection goes to the nearest Cloudflare edge location — one of 300+ worldwide.

• Direct-to-edge connectivity: Users connect to the nearest PoP, typically under 50ms away
• No concentrator bottleneck: There's no single point to overwhelm
• Full traffic inspection: Security policies apply at the edge, not at a centralized bottleneck
• Scales automatically: Cloudflare's network handles 20%+ of all internet traffic — your Monday morning login surge is a rounding error

Your users get faster access. Your security team gets full visibility. Your IT team stops fielding "VPN is slow" tickets.