✨ A Tale of VPN Nightmares and Zero Trust Bliss: The Cloud Security Journey
Vishal Alhat
🧑💻 Personal Context:
I have been in software development, cloud and cybersecurity for over a decade. Building VPNs, configuring firewalls, and dealing with ancient infrastructures in the cloud world... It’s been quite a journey. From the days of using IPSec tunnels until the development of SSL-VPNs, I managed to overcome every network security tool.
At present, I am A Independent AWS DevOps and MLOPS consultant, an AWS Hero and a HashiCorp Ambassador, and I fix ancient problems with new solutions. Let me explain a story about how one particular company came close to failing because of outdated VPNs—and what we did to fix the issue.
🎭 Act 1: The Mid-Night Woes
📱 My phone buzzed at 2 a.m. A client in the fintech industry—let’s say “SecureBank”—was having a problem. Their offshore team could not access critical AWS workloads, and their legacy VPN was crippled with over 500 concurrent users. Sound familiar?
🛠️ SecureBank IT had implemented a poorly thought-out mixture of VPN appliances, static firewall rules, and deep user customization.
😩 Developers were at their wits' end.
🔍 Auditors were tailing them.
🧑💼 The CISO was losing more and more white hairs daily from worrying about lateral movement risks.
💣 VPN had become the crux of this entire mess.
🏦 The rent was due, and no matter how fragmented their infrastructure was, they had to access their AWS and on-prem servers.
🙏 The CISO begged:
“We need a Band-Aid solution by morning.”
Little did he know—shoving Band-Aids under the cracks wouldn’t work.
🕳️ Act 2: Venturing into The World of VPN Pain Points
SecureBank is an archetypical example of why legacy remote access VPNs fail modern enterprises, courtesy of HashiCorp's blog.
🤯 Over-Complicated Systems
AWS resources: Statically whitelisted IP assets? Nightmarish to manage.
Scaling? Goes brrr.
👥 User On-boarding
- Former employees still had access, thanks to HR’s spreadsheet-to-VPN matrix.
🧩 Lopsided Control
- Forget hierarchy—everyone had their own firewall flavor. Chaos ensued.
🎭 Security Theater
🏃 “Prison breakout”: Unlimited lateral access.
🔐 MFA? Sure—if you count reused passwords as multi-factor.
🐌 Performance Woes
🌍 Developers in Mumbai accessed AWS us-east-1 via a VPN in Virginia.
📉 Latency? 300ms+.
🧾 Audit Headaches
“It’s everyone’s favorite game: Who accessed what, and when?”
Logs were scattered across appliances and SIEMs.
🛠️ Act 3: The HashiCorp Intervention
“This is a relic. VPNs are so 1999.
We’re going zero-trust.”
Here's what we implemented:
🛡️ HashiCorp Boundary
❌ No more VPN tunnels
⏱️ Just-In-Time (JIT) access to:
AWS EC2
RDS
Kubernetes
🔐 Credentialless auth via Okta
🎥 Session recording for audit transparency
Image source: Hashicorp blog
🔗 HashiCorp Consul + AWS VPC
🔄 Replaced static firewalls with dynamic service-to-service encryption
✅ Only whitelisted microservices could communicate
⚙️ Terraform for Automation
🔄 Access policies as Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
👷 No more manual labor
🌅 Act 4: The Sunrise
🚀 Reduced latency by 80%—users routed to the closest AWS region
🛡️ Attack surface shrunk
🔒 No more open ports or dormant credentials
😌 The CISO slept soundly again
💬 Best of all, developer happiness skyrocketed:
“I finally feel like I’m working in 2024, not 2004.”
📚 Epilogue: Why Is This Important
In the 1990s, VPNs were revolutionary.
In 2024’s cloud-native world? They’re an impediment.
As a HashiCorp Ambassador, I’ve seen transformation through:
🔐 Least-privilege access enforcement
🌐 Proxying frameworks
⚙️ Smooth zero-trust transitions without breaking legacy
👋 To my fellow cloud warriors:
The VPN era is over.
Your users will thank you.
👨💻 About the Author
Vishal Alhat has worked across AWS, DevOps, cybersecurity, and AI for over a decade.
🏆 AWS Community Hero
🏆 HashiCorp Ambassador
☕ In his free time, he’s either ranting about IPv6 or brewing espresso.
🔗 Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter
📖 Motivated by:
The Pain Points of VPNs in Enterprise IT – HashiCorp Blog
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