Remote Work Crushes VPNs: One Telemedicine Company's Fix
When stay-at-home orders swept the globe in March, organizations scrambled to move entire workforces online. Cloudflare, alongside its partners, responded by offering free products and services with onboarding support to help businesses secure and accelerate suddenly-remote environments. A dedicated team spent months meeting with hundreds of organizations—from startups to large enterprises—to extend better security and performance to remote staff.
The most common pain point: VPNs. Most companies had one, but not configured for a fully remote workforce. As employees logged in from home, VPN appliances became overloaded, causing performance lags. Simply purchasing more licenses wasn't the answer—organizations needed to reduce the traffic load on their VPNs by moving select applications off the private network entirely.
A 15-Minute Migration
One customer, a service connecting physicians to patients over the Internet, had to enable company-wide remote work within 48 hours. Moving the entire workforce onto a VPN risked overwhelming both their appliances and IT help desk. Any disruption threatened business continuity at a time of peak demand, particularly when doctor's office environments felt unsafe.
Cloudflare Access had been on this customer's radar for a while, and its adoption couldn't have come at a better moment. With help from Cloudflare's customer success manager (CSM), solution engineers, and product managers, the organization migrated its internally-hosted applications to Cloudflare Access in under 15 minutes. Within 24 hours, hundreds of team members were using the product. A critical call center application was operationalized without a VPN at the click of a button—over 700 users signed on almost instantly, with more added daily.
The customer's reaction: "...we should have done this a long time ago. It's beautiful, this is perfect."
Remote work may become a permanent arrangement for many organizations, and this migration model is proving sustainable.
Built on an Existing Foundation
This telemedicine company had been a Cloudflare customer for five years, initially using Infrastructure products to protect external sites—their website and customer-facing applications. Because of that setup, the call center app's domain was already IP whitelisted on Cloudflare via Zone lockdown, an Enterprise feature. Their familiarity with Cloudflare's WAF and CDN made extending those benefits to internal employees a natural next step.
The path to rapid adoption was paved long before the crisis hit. The customer regularly engaged with Cloudflare through in-person events, webinars, email, feature request reviews, and phone catch-ups. They first learned about Access technology at Cloudflare Connect in NYC the previous year—a forum for interacting with the community, discovering new technology, and brainstorming with onsite experts.
When COVID-19 forced the issue, everything they'd absorbed through constant interaction finally came to fruition. Cloudflare was already a trusted advisor, not a vendor to call in an emergency.
The Takeaway for Teams
This story carries a broader lesson: stay engaged with your technology providers. Cloudflare continues to host events and webinars, and its blog, developer docs, and support pages offer ongoing education. According to Cloudflare, after one webinar and a single meeting, organizations can transition a whole work environment to virtual operation.
Cloudflare for Teams is available free for up to 50 users, and monthly product chats cover the latest features, including Cloudflare for Teams and Cloudflare Workers.
