The Problem
You get the call: a critical asset at a remote substation is down. The next OT engineer is a thousand miles away. The plan? Have them connect via the corporate virtual private network (VPN) to diagnose the issue. But the connection is laggy, the VPN client on their laptop needs an update, and you’re silently worrying about granting network-level access to a sensitive industrial environment from an external machine.
This scenario is all too common. While VPNs have been the workhorse of remote access for decades, in the modern industrial landscape, they are often a complex, costly, and insecure bottleneck. The time is now to look beyond the traditional VPN and embrace a more secure, scalable, and efficient architecture.
The Quiet Costs and Loud Failures of Industrial VPNs
The sticker price of a VPN appliance is just the tip of the iceberg. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reveals a much larger financial and operational burden, especially in demanding industrial settings.
1. The TCO Iceberg: Direct & Indirect Costs
Beyond the obvious costs of hardware, licenses, and maintenance contracts, industrial VPNs accumulate significant hidden expenses:
- Downtime from Failure or Misconfiguration: A misconfigured or failed VPN concentrator can take down remote access for your entire operation, directly impacting revenue and production.
- Security Breach Recovery Costs: An average data breach costs millions, encompassing forensic investigation, legal fees, notification expenses, and the engineering time required to restore operations and harden defenses.
- Regulatory Fines & Reputational Damage: Insecure remote access and non-compliance with industry regulations can lead to hefty fines, severe reputational damage, and the significant costs associated with a security breach, impacting customer trust and market standing.
2. Scalability Nightmares
As you add more sites and devices, the traditional hub-and-spoke VPN model begins to crumble. Scaling means more hardware, more licenses, and an exponentially more complex web of tunnels to manage and troubleshoot. This administrative overhead stifles agility and slows down the expansion of your IoT initiatives.
3. The “Castle-and-Moat” Security Flaw
This is the most critical issue. A VPN operates on an outdated security model. Once a user is authenticated, they are “inside the castle” and often granted broad access to an entire network segment.
This creates two massive problems:
- Increased Blast Radius: If an attacker compromises a user’s credentials, they gain a foothold into your entire OT network, allowing them to move laterally and potentially disrupt physical operations.
- Large Attack Surface: The VPN concentrator itself becomes a publicly exposed, high-value target for attackers.
Fundamentally, VPNs are ill-suited for the granular, “never trust, always verify” principles of a modern Zero Trust Architecture.
The solution: A Modern Approach: Cloud-Native, Zero Trust Access
Instead of punching a hole in your firewall for a VPN, a modern remote access solution operates on a fundamentally more secure principle: no open inbound ports.
Connections are always initiated from the device outwards to a cloud-based broker. This means your operational network remains isolated from the public internet, dramatically reducing your attack surface. All communication is tunneled through an encrypted, authenticated channel (like a secure WebSocket), and access is granted on a per-user, per-device, per-protocol basis—not to the entire network.
How Cumulocity’s Cloud Remote Access Delivers
Cumulocity’s Cloud Remote Access is built on this secure, cloud-native foundation, eliminating the need for VPNs entirely.
Through a simple web interface, it provides authenticated and authorized users with direct, proxied access to remote devices using the protocols they already know:
- VNC for remote desktop control
- SSH for secure shell access
- Telnet for legacy systems (with the ability to disable it for enhanced security)
- Passthrough for any other TCP-based protocol, like local (web) servers which should be accessed by native clients installed on the machine of the OT-Engineer.
All traffic is tunneled through a secure, TLS-encrypted WebSocket initiated by the device. This is further enhanced by our seamless integration with thin-edge.io, the open-source, lightweight agent that makes secure, scalable device connectivity simple.
The Tangible Benefits: Beyond a VPN Replacement
Adopting this model delivers significant, measurable advantages:
Drastically Reduce Costs
Eliminate the hardware, licensing, and specialized labor costs of managing a distributed VPN infrastructure. Convert capital expenses into a flexible, pay-as-you-go operational model. Faster, more reliable diagnostics also mean fewer technician visits and less costly downtime.
Achieve True Scalability and Agility
Onboard a new site or hundreds of new devices without complex network planning. Whether you’re accessing a device directly or using one device as a secure gateway to its local network, the solution scales effortlessly, accelerating your time-to-value for any IoT project.
Enhance Security and Ensure Compliance
Embrace a Zero Trust model out-of-the-box.
- Granular Control: Meticulous Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) ensures engineers can only access the specific devices and services they are authorized for.
- Reduced Attack Surface: With no open ports on your firewall, you eliminate a primary vector for attacks.
- Comprehensive Audit Trails: Every remote session is logged, providing a clear, immutable record for security audits and regulatory compliance.
Summary: Stop Patching a Legacy System
In today’s distributed industrial world, relying on traditional VPNs is no longer a sustainable strategy. The costs are too high, the management is too complex, and the security risks are too great.
Cumulocity’s Cloud Remote Access provides the secure, scalable, and cost-effective foundation needed to manage modern IoT ecosystems efficiently. It allows you to focus on optimizing your operations, not on troubleshooting your network infrastructure.
Ready to simplify your remote operations and enhance your security posture?
- Schedule a Demo
- Read the Getting Started Guide