Consumer VPN apps protect one laptop on coffee-shop Wi-Fi. Enterprise VPN solutions connect entire workforces and data centers with multi-region infrastructure, SSO/SAML identity, and the compliance logging your auditors expect.
Most of what you read online about VPNs is consumer marketing. Here is what changes when you move from a personal app to enterprise VPN infrastructure.
The word “VPN” covers two very different products. NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark are consumer privacy tools — one app, one user, designed to hide your traffic from your ISP. An enterprise VPN solution is infrastructure: it authenticates employees against your identity provider, enforces who can reach which internal resource, logs every session for your auditors, and connects offices and clouds together. Different product, different buyer, different price tag.
Consumer VPNs use a username and password you set yourself. Enterprise VPNs federate to your identity provider — Okta, Azure AD / Entra ID, Google Workspace, JumpCloud, OneLogin — via SAML or OIDC. When IT disables an employee in the directory, their VPN access dies in the same minute. SCIM provisioning automates user lifecycle so you are not maintaining two user lists.
A consumer VPN gives you the whole internet. An enterprise VPN deployment enforces policy by user, by group, by device posture, and by destination. Engineering reaches the staging VPC; finance reaches the ERP subnet; contractors reach exactly one Jira instance and nothing else. Policies live in code, get reviewed, and get audited.
Every authentication, session start, session end, policy decision, and configuration change is recorded with timestamps and shipped to your SIEM. This is not optional — it is what an auditor opens first.
Enterprise clients can be deployed in always-on mode, refuse to connect from a jailbroken or out-of-date device, and route only corporate traffic through the tunnel while letting Netflix go direct.
The other half of enterprise VPN is the part with no human user: persistent IPSec or WireGuard tunnels stitching branch offices, AWS VPCs, Azure VNets, and on-prem data centers into one routable network.
Zero-Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is a better model for human-to-app access — and we deploy it. But site-to-site, legacy applications that expect a flat L3 network, machine-to-machine connectivity, and OT / IoT networks still need a tunnel. In practice most enterprises run both, with VPN as the network layer and ZTNA as the identity-aware proxy on top.
Most environments need two or three of these working together. We design the topology around your offices, clouds, users, and compliance posture.
Per-user tunnels for employees, contractors, and partners. SAML SSO, MFA, device posture checks, and platform clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Persistent encrypted tunnels between branch offices, headquarters, and data centers. IPSec/IKEv2 or WireGuard, with BGP routing, redundant peers, and automatic failover.
Tunnels between AWS, Azure, GCP, and private clouds. Transit gateways, VPC peering alternatives, and multi-cloud meshes for workloads that span providers.
Identity-aware proxies that replace blanket network access with per-application authorization. Cloudflare Access, Tailscale, Netbird, or self-hosted equivalents.
Distributed VPN nodes across regions with intelligent routing for low-latency connections. Anycast entry points, regional concentrators, and consistent policy everywhere.
Hardened deployments with tamper-evident session logging, configuration change tracking, and SIEM integration sized for PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 evidence.
Both options use the same underlying technology. The question is who owns the pager and who pays the per-user fee. Here is the honest comparison.
We run the infrastructure on our cloud or yours, you get a contractual SLA, and your IT team never touches a config file unless they want to.
Best for teams without a dedicated network engineer or those carrying SOC 2 / HIPAA obligations.
We design, deploy, and document the stack on your infrastructure, then hand the keys to your team. You own it from day one.
Best for organizations with capable sysadmins, strict data-residency rules, or strong “own everything” preferences.
No religion about protocols. We pick what fits your performance, compliance, and identity requirements — and we will tell you when your current stack is fine and you do not need to migrate.
A typical mid-size rollout is four to eight weeks from kickoff to full cutover, depending on number of sites, user count, and compliance scope.
Map every office, remote user, cloud VPC, on-prem subnet, and SaaS dependency. Document existing identity provider, compliance scope, and traffic patterns.
Choose hub-and-spoke or full-mesh, pick protocols, define IP plan and routing, and design the SAML/SCIM identity flow. Reviewed and signed off before any build.
Build in staging, validate failover and policy, then roll users in waves — pilot group, department, full org — with rollback ready at every step.
24/7 monitoring, patching, capacity reviews, quarterly access certifications, and annual penetration testing as part of the managed engagement.
If your VPN cannot answer “who connected, from where, to what, and when” in seconds, it will not survive an audit.
Consumer VPN providers brand themselves on not keeping logs. That is a feature for individuals dodging trackers and a hard dealbreaker for any regulated business. PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 all require evidence that you can identify who accessed protected systems and when. Without VPN logs, you cannot.
For PCI-DSS and HIPAA we ship the standard fields auditors expect: user identifier and session ID, source IP, destination IP and port, timestamp with timezone, authentication method (SAML / certificate / MFA factor used), device posture results, session duration, and bytes in/out. Configuration changes are logged separately with the actor and a diff.
For SOC 2 we add tamper-evident storage — logs ship in near real time to your SIEM (Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, Sumo Logic, Wazuh) and to a write-once archive. Access to the logs is itself logged. Retention follows your policy, typically twelve months hot and seven years archived for healthcare and finance.
For ISO 27001 we provide quarterly access-review reports that list every active VPN account, their group memberships, and last login — the artifact your control owner needs to certify and sign.
Pulled from real scoping calls. If yours is not here, ask us directly — we would rather answer it before you sign anything.
A consumer VPN (NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark) is a single app for a single person, sold on the promise of hiding their traffic and not keeping logs. An enterprise VPN solution is infrastructure: it federates with your SSO, enforces per-resource access policies, integrates with MFA, logs every session for compliance, and supports site-to-site tunnels between offices and clouds. They share a name and almost nothing else.
Yes — for the workloads it is good at. Zero-Trust Network Access has largely replaced VPN for human-to-application access in modern environments. But VPN is still the right answer for site-to-site connectivity, machine-to-machine traffic, OT and IoT networks, and the long tail of legacy apps that expect a flat L3 network. Most enterprises we work with run both, and we deploy both.
Managed engagements typically run $4–$12 per user per month for remote access, with site-to-site tunnels priced per location. A self-hosted deployment is a one-time engineering fee — usually $8K–$40K depending on number of sites, identity integration complexity, and compliance scope — plus your own infrastructure costs. We quote a fixed price after the discovery call so you do not get a surprise.
Yes. SAML 2.0, OIDC, and SCIM 2.0 are baseline. We have integrated with Okta, Azure AD / Entra ID, Google Workspace, JumpCloud, OneLogin, Auth0, Keycloak, and self-hosted LDAP. Group memberships drive VPN policy, and de-provisioning is automatic when a user is disabled in the directory.
Yes — this is one of the most common deployments we run. Typical pattern is redundant IPSec tunnels from your on-prem firewall to AWS Transit Gateway with BGP for dynamic routing, plus a backup tunnel through a second AWS region. We also do AWS-to-Azure, AWS-to-GCP, and on-prem-to-everything meshes.
Per-session records with user ID, source/destination IPs, timestamps, authentication method, MFA factor, device posture results, session duration, and bytes transferred. Configuration changes are logged separately with actor and diff. Logs ship to your SIEM in near real time and to a tamper-evident archive. We provide quarterly access-review reports as ready-to-attach audit artifacts.
Both are supported — the policy is yours to set. We can lock VPN access to managed devices only (using device certificates or MDM posture from Jamf, Intune, Kandji), allow BYOD with stricter checks (disk encryption, OS version, screen lock), or run a tiered model where BYOD users get scoped access and managed laptops get the full network. Most clients run a hybrid.
Tell us your sites, user count, identity provider, and compliance scope. We’ll come back within 24 hours with a topology sketch and a fixed-price proposal.
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