Businesses rapidly adopting OpenVPN’s next-gen VPN solutions

OpenVPN announced that businesses are rapidly adopting the company’s next-generation virtual private network (VPN) solutions to adapt to the changes in work and adoption of cloud accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Over the past 18 months, the company, at times, experienced as much as 70 percent growth, which, according to market research firms’ projections, was four times faster than the expected market growth rates.

Adoption of its OpenVPN Cloud solution is growing even faster at 50 percent quarterly growth in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) over the last quarter. This rapid customer growth comes as businesses shifted IT priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic to best support remote workforces and accelerate digital strategies for growth, as well as expanding investment in the cloud.

OpenVPN introduced its next-gen OpenVPN Cloud solution in May 2020 to help businesses of all sizes to quickly, easily, and cost-effectively connect private networks, devices, and servers to build a secure, virtualized modern network–without the need for complex and expensive proprietary hardware (routers, firewalls, and other traditional approaches).

For organizations that use or plan to use Zero Trust Access (ZTA), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Software Defined Networking (SDN), next-gen VPN is a critical layer that supports and accommodates these approaches. To support the adoption of its OpenVPN Cloud solution, the company continues to increase the number of worldwide PoPs. In addition, to support current and future growth, and add innovative and differentiating features, OpenVPN is aggressively hiring the best talent worldwide.

“Sophisticated threats, regionally and remotely distributed workforces, work from home, the growth of IoT, and the move to the cloud make the old, rigid ways of connecting and insulating your assets obsolete. The days of legacy VPN as purely remote access or site-to-site are gone. Modern network architecture requires room for contemporary approaches to sit on top of a private networking foundation,” said Francis Dinha, Co-founder and CEO, OpenVPN. “Our continued and rapid growth can be attributed to our ability to help organizations secure the business at scale while providing a seamless experience even as priorities change whether it’s a pandemic, rapid rollout of digital strategies or accelerated cloud journey.”

OpenVPN’s growth trajectory more than 4x market projected rate

OpenVPN counts tens of thousands of businesses as customers around the world. The VPN market is expected to reach between $107.6 billion (ResearchAndMarkets.com) and $120 billion (Global Market Insights) by 2027, which represents a CAGR of between 15% and 17.2%. OpenVPN grew by as much as 70% during the last 18 months, which is four times faster than the expected market growth rate.

In addition, more than 97% of its customers renew or expand the number of VPN connections. OpenVPN Cloud surpassed millions of connection hours per week, which represents 50% growth each quarter and is the company’s fastest growing solution since being introduced last year. In addition Cloud Service Providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud use the open source or commercial offerings from OpenVPN to enable secure access to its cloud services.

OpenVPN continues to see strong growth in North America, which is approximately 50% of the customer base and is rapidly growing in EMEA, representing more than one-third of customers. Organizations across many industries are adopting OpenVPN solutions, especially within IT services, software publishers, management consulting, telecommunications, retail, education, financial services, healthcare and insurance.

As more businesses increase cloud adoption, more customers are using OpenVPN solutions to secure access to the internet, SaaS applications and corporate resources for employees. In addition, digitally-minded customers are using OpenVPN solutions to protect IoT and sensor based systems including distributed control systems, financial transactions, Point of Sale (PoS) systems, connected cameras and security monitoring.

“According to ESG research 75% of organizations have reported that their IT environments are either more or significantly more complex than two years ago. The top driver behind this complexity? The increase in remote workers. As organizations distribute applications across on-premises data centers, multiple public clouds and edge locations and remote work become the norm, it will be critical that every worker can securely connect to the applications and services to ensure productivity and a positive experience,” stated Bob Laliberte, Sr. Analyst, ESG.

“With organizations looking to deploy long term solutions for remote workers, the next generation OpenVPN Cloud solution should be on the short list. It enables organizations to dramatically reduce the complexity and risk associated with connecting remote workers and devices to the applications they need to be productive. In addition, the cloud-based platform eliminates classic VPN latency issues by providing direct access to cloud-based applications, ensuring positive experiences.”

OpenVPN Cloud: Redefining the next generation VPN for modern networks

OpenVPN Cloud takes the complexity and high cost out of building and managing a secure private network. It delivers to its customers an elegant cloud-based solution with an adaptive and dynamic platform that can easily grow as businesses grow, whether connecting on-premises or to the IaaS cloud, which has attracted more DevOps and IT operations teams. OpenVPN Cloud helps businesses quickly, easily, and cost-effectively connect private networks, devices, and servers to build a secure and virtualized modern network.

To make this possible, OpenVPN has vertically integrated technologies from advanced IP routing and secure access, threat detection and prevention, and firewall into its virtualized, mesh-connected, high-speed network platform with worldwide PoPs. The company continues to deliver enhancements to the platform with additional capabilities, including domain routing, Cyber Shield (DNS-based content filtering), and unique resource publishing and sharing.

To keep up with demand for OpenVPN Cloud, the company added 12 new VPN regions last year and will be investing to add 12 more VPN regions over the next year, tripling the number of regions covered including expanded points of presence in South America, Asia and others, in addition to North America and Europe.

“With a multi-site e-commerce development platform serving customers globally, we needed a simple and easy way to provision secure access for our users across separate networks to support our employees working from home. We were up and running with OpenVPN Cloud in minutes and our developers working from home are able to securely access network resources and servers over the internet quickly,” said Andrew Williams, Technical Development Manager, at Magic42.

“As we offer home, farm and auto insurance throughout the states of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, it was really important to us to give our independent agents an easy and simple way to access the network to serve our clients. OpenVPN Cloud multilayered VPN approach enables us to improve our security posture, reduce the overall exposure on the networks due to the current cyber climate, and protects us from reaching malicious websites outside the network, which translates to less disruptions and more productivity,” said Sam Bana, COO and CIO, at Columbia Lloyds Insurance Company.

“Our employees need to collaborate with e-commerce clients in Chicago while delivering superior CX and support experiences to their customers from our operations centers in West Africa. OpenVPN gives our employees access to the network and shared resources in a secure manner. With the DNS filtering feature in Cyber Shield, we’re protected across all our networks and environments against malware, phishing attacks and ransomware that are growing more sophisticated and have the potential to cause unwanted business disruptions,” said John Kokobili of Hugo.

History of innovation backed by open source roots

OpenVPN has a legacy of introducing networking and cybersecurity innovations to the market. The company’s leadership has deep backgrounds across telecommunications, networking and security that in their previous roles have led to solutions that have been proven out in the market. The strategic vision and business acumen of co-founder and CEO Francis Dinha has enabled the company’s continued growth.

With compelling solutions, OpenVPN is helping reshape the IT infrastructure landscape in support of the evolving needs of modern businesses while empowering them to securely and seamlessly connect even with rapid changes driven by digital strategies for growth and the increased usage of cloud services.

“At the heart of OpenVPN are our open source roots that have resulted in a robust and inclusive open source (OS) community. The contributions, feedback and information sharing from the community are invaluable in shaping how it improves technology and expands the way we think about new products and features,” added Dinha.

The latest contributions from the open source community have led us to build capabilities that are available in OpenVPN Cloud including:

• Data Channel Offload (DCO) feature enables data encryption and handling in the kernel greatly improving data throughput performance, especially as businesses are adopting bandwidth-hungry applications to take advantage of faster connectivity options
• AWS integration to quickly and automatically propagate VPN routes to the AWS VPC routing tables
• SAML support for integration with third-party IAM solutions

Doubling down to support accelerating growth trajectory

To support the company’s continued growth and expanding customer base, OpenVPN will be aggressively hiring globally across customer success, tech support, marketing, product development and engineering. Over the next 12 months, the company will double the size of its customer success team and number of technical support engineers; grow marketing headcount by 50%; and grow product development and IT operations teams by 30%.