About Paul Barrett
In 2020, Paul Barrett, Chief Technology Officer of Enterprise at Netscout, discussed the company's data model and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on enterprise VPN usage. He described Netscout's data model as having multiple levels, including the storage of raw packets and rich data related to individual transactions, and noted that for most network protocols the company can map data to a common model, allowing insight into different applications and protocols in a single pane of glass. Barrett stated that Netscout services the largest and most complex organizations in the US and globally, and that for many of these organizations, VPN services were originally designed for a small subset of the workforce.
Barrett explained that the shift to widespread remote work created challenges, as many organizations' VPN configurations were not architected for the sudden increase in demand. He distinguished between full VPN connections, where all internet traffic goes through the enterprise network, and split VPN connections, where only business service traffic goes through the VPN. Barrett said that a lot of energy had been put into providing visibility around VPN services, which had previously not been seen as a critical component. He also noted that customers were thinking about future needs, such as split VPN migration and over-provisioning, and that organizations that had already transitioned to virtualized infrastructure were in a stronger position to adapt.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Paul Barrett's recent appearances.
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Transcript (3 segments)
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Paul Barrett0:00
With NETSCOUT, we service the largest, most complex organizations both in the US and globally. But for many of these organizations, the VPN services they provided were for quite a small subset of their workforce—people working on the road, maybe a small subset of employees working from home. And as you say, obviously, as we all understand, almost overnight everyone found themselves struggling to work from home. Quite frankly, most organizations' VPN configurations were just never architected to deal with this kind of situation.
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Interviewer0:35
One of the perhaps most important distinctions between the different types of VPN is whether you have a so-called full VPN service or a split VPN service, because that really impacted the ability of organizations to deliver VPN. So what does that mean, full versus split? I know that sometimes there's free VPNs—you kind of get what you pay for. What does that mean, split versus full?
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Paul Barrett1:02
So with a full VPN connection, everything that you connect to on the internet or any business service has to go over your VPN connection. You can't make any direct connections from your PC to the internet; it has to go through your enterprise network. So if you think about it, if you've suddenly moved tens of thousands of employees to working from home, every single communication activity performed by those employees goes through your VPN concentrators. With a split VPN—and for example, I use a split VPN—only when I need to connect to business services that are provided over my enterprise network do I actually go directly to my enterprise network over the VPN. If I'm just going to Google or any other regular internet resource, then I get a direct connection to that internet resource, and that really takes the pressure off the VPN concentrators.
