As organizations continue to push the boundaries of innovation, remote access have become a cornerstone of growth and resiliency. However, when it comes to determining the total price of remote access, the answer cannot be discovered simply through a straightforward calculation.
While sticker price is one of the most important aspects to consider when choosing your remote access solution, it shouldn’t be the only cost or value driver you consider, especially when your enterprise’s security is at stake. In this blog, we’ll explore a few of the network security costs that organizations tend to underestimate when it comes to remote access.
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, IT and security policies focused on perimeter-based network activity within an organization’s office or corporate networks. However, companies’ rapid adoption of remote work paradigms and third-party vendors has caused tremendous operational and budgetary changes. Frankly, most organizations were underprepared for the new complexity associated with managing their extended perimeters and exponentially increasing endpoints in so little time.
With teams scattered beyond the walls of physical offices and between a tapestry of traditional tools, organizations now face a considerable challenge in putting a price on remote access and the security posture of their networks. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for many indirect costs to be overlooked by decision-makers. Below are some of the most prevalent and important costs to consider when evaluating new remote access solutions.
Hidden Costs of Remote Access Solutions
Time and Complexity
Time is the biggest cost organizations have to foot the bill for when it comes to access. Despite their alluring promises, the reality is that most remote access solutions are painfully complex for an organization to deploy — let alone use! Many teams report productivity being stunted because they must spend thousands of hours every year managing fragmented tools, escalating requests, troubleshooting issues, and trying to audit activity — not costs that many network security teams can afford.
Scalability and Flexibility
Traditional approaches to providing remote access often fail to meet the evolving needs of modern, cloud-native organizations. As an organization expands or shrinks, the number of people and services connected to its infrastructure changes rapidly. This typically means that more engineers and tools are needed to manage essential business operations. However, both the proliferation and fluctuation of remote access also increase the amount of risk that already-overextended teams must mitigate. Consequently, organizations often find themselves taking on more overhead and technical debt than they had anticipated.
Auditability and Compliance
When calculating the expenses associated with providing remote access, IT and security teams should also consider whether their auditing and compliance requirements are accounted for in the price. Organizations must ensure that remote access solutions satisfy internal and external compliance requirements through identity-aware audit trails and session forensics. After all, the cheaper solution can quickly become an organization’s most expensive choice if it fails an audit or suffers a breach due to inadequate access control.
Whether you’re empowering a distributed workforce or separating compute resources for resiliency, the need for simple, secure, and affordable remote access solutions is here to stay. So, when it comes time to crunch the numbers, organizations should always consider the total value they receive from a solution — not just the initial cost of access alone. Modern teams need a modern solution and a good understanding of what network security costs they will need to pay in money, time, and employee hours. However, most organizations have more risks and privileges to juggle than their people, processes, and technology can manage.
BastionZero helps you break free from the complexity associated with remote access through a cloud-native access experience that is simple to deploy, easy to use, and a breeze to maintain. The BastionZero Trustless Access Platform™ connects teams to resources without risking the keys to your kingdom. With our multi-root trustless access protocol, you can reclaim your architecture from over-privileged third parties and ensure that the right people have access to the right resources at the right time.
