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Corporate VPN huffing and puffing while everyone works from home over COVID-19? You're not alone, admins

Microsoft and others take steps to handle remote staffer crunch

With the COVID-19 outbreak pushing many companies to keep workers at home, admins are finding themselves having to deal with a crunch of traffic on VPNs and network appliances suddenly overwhelmed with remote connections.

Microsoft on Tuesday issued guidance for admins on how to manage their Office 365 installations with so many employees suddenly making the shift from on-premise to remote work, and how they can handle the traffic crunch as employees run through the VPN on their way to the cloud service.

"The recent COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak has caused many customers to rapidly enable, or proactively plan for the bulk of their employees working from home," explained Office 365 senior program manager Paul Collinge.

"This sudden switch of connectivity model for the majority of users typically has a significant impact on the corporate network infrastructure which may have been scaled and designed before any major cloud service was rolled out and in some cases, not designed for a situation when it is required simultaneously by all users."

To help with the crunch, Microsoft is advising admins to set up their VPNs with split tunneling to identify traffic (Microsoft provides a list of URLs and IP addresses for its endpoints) and route it directly to the Office365 service.

"The key to this solution is separating out the critical Office 365 traffic, which is both latency-sensitive, and which also puts enormous load on the traditional network architecture," Collinge noted.

"We then treat this traffic differently and use the user's local internet connection to route the connectivity directly to the service."

Microsoft is not the only company making steps to alleviate the remote worker traffic crunch. Box CEO Aaron Levie said that his service will lift user caps for enterprise customers.

Dante Malagrino, chief development officer at Riverbed Technologies, told The Register that his customers have been increasingly trying to get a handle on traffic running through the network as workers go through the corporate VPN on their way to cloud services.

"Most corporate networks were simply not designed to perform under such simultaneous demand, and in the age of cloud-based apps, services and remote workforces," he said.

"As coronavirus has become more widespread globally, we're seeing organizations everywhere take measures to protect the well-being of employees, including supporting larger work-from-home network scenarios." ®

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