Global Biotech IT Group Ensures Telecommuter Productivity

While most enterprises had procedures for telecommuting, only a few were ready to accommodate virtually all of their employees working from home (WFH) at once due to the pandemic. The IT team of a major multinational biopharmaceutical organizations also scrambled to prepare their business continuity plan, which included provisioning adequate resources for the virtual private network (VPN) connectivity in all domestic and overseas locations.

Due to the unexpected nature of the pandemic, this IT team had to add extra capacity using a combination of virtual and physical VPN appliances. They relied on the VPN gateway vendor data sheets to size the new capacity provisioning, however confidence in their plan was shaken as some of the remote users began to experience inconsistent VPN quality of experience.

The Challenge: Confidence in Business Continuity Plan

This organization increased VPN capacity across two of their major international sites. They thought they had dimensioned the VPN gateway to accept 4,000 and 6,000 concurrent SSL VPN connections. However, the new rollout wasn’t as smooth as they had hoped, as multiple issues were reported by their employees, impacting their user productivity. The IT organization was facing a crisis.

The VPN gateway vendor was not able to isolate the issue but did reconfirm the provisioning should be able support the desired concurrent SSL VPN sessions. They recommended the IT group contact Keysight for a test solution that could validate the limits of the VPN infrastructure under their realistic production network conditions.

The Solution: Just-in-Time Validation

Keysight’s SSL VPN Assessment Service was the right fit to validate the realistic capacity and performance of their newly upgraded VPN gateways that were servicing two key offshore sites. In partnership with the Keysight’s Professional Services engineers, the IT team was able to systematically isolate the issue through a series of tests that were executed simulating various real-world deployment conditions and VPN gateway parameters. The turn-key SSL VPN Assessment Service emulated the desired number of VPN clients from a public cloud—initiating connections to the VPN gateways and generating a controlled volume of traffic over the established VPN connections. The entire testing was conducted in a controlled and secured manner during a maintenance window to avoid any undue disruption to the production network.

The Test Results: Under-sized VPN Infrastructure

One of the suspicions for the reported connectivity issues was the connection rate, several test sessions were executed at varying connection setup rates between 2 and 16 new connections per second. Results clearly showcased the number of successful connections and connection establishment time, and no major differences were noticed for the different connections rates. The IT/Keysight team concluded that the VPN gateway was able to sustain the VPN connection rates.

Keysight then moved on to validate the VPN capacity limits and were able to prove that both of the VPN gateways were capable of sustaining the maximum capacity of 4,000 and 6,000 concurrent VPN tunnels.