Anastasiya Novikava
Copywriter
Anastasiya believes cybersecurity should be easy to understand. She is particularly interested in studying nation-state cyber-attacks. Outside of work, she enjoys history, 1930s screwball comedies, and Eurodance music.
Oxylabs is a leading premium proxy and public web data acquisition solution provider. Its ethical web scraping and public web data gathering tools stand on strong proxy networks, so businesses use them for market research, price intelligence, SEO research, and many other reasons.
Understanding speed as a value proposition, especially in B2B relations, an enterprise has a much grander scale of high-quality demand as service perception affects a unit as a whole. However, good service results from complex elements that must be supervised and mostly remain behind the scenes. Head of Risk Management Vaidotas Sedys shared what essential aspects of developing a well-performing service stay backstage.
The Challenge
Speedy connection to company resources from anywhere
Oxylabs offers reliable, flexible, and high-performing infrastructure for their clients. At the same time, the company has to ensure high velocity for internal processes within its network as it impacts business performance and procedural productivity.
The HQ is in Lithuania — most employees work in Vilnius and Kaunas offices, and the company has a small team overseas in the US. Combined with hybrid work policies, international teams need secure access to a company network to prevent data breaches and enable people to perform their tasks anywhere.
Circling back from work-from-home transition to business trips and maintaining the possibility of working from anywhere doubles up the incoming variable traffic load and potential risk scenarios.
Even though the team is mainly local, business trips or international colleagues from the US, Germany, or the UK expose company resources to WiFi of airports, hotels, public networks, etc.
VPN supports safe connections to the company network from various countries. Still, the differences in distance to a requested gateway might showcase time delays in how quickly you can access the organization’s resources and information assets.
Security solution like a VPN service does its job for encrypting the traffic and applying overall protection for the network. However, depending on the location, it may sometimes result in inflated latency and slow connection speeds — an inconvenience for the team trying to do their daily tasks.
Every solution has pros and cons, and additional improvements must balance out disadvantages. How could traveling and international teams access better connection speed performance without significant changes in security infrastructure solutions implemented in the organization?
The Solution
New VPN protocol to secure stable business flow
Poising adequate security and relying on undercrowded solutions that ultimately improve the effectiveness of implemented tools and security policies might make IT managers feel lost in finding the best direction, where to start, and how to continue on the right path.
In some cases, a strategy of mixing and matching different security solutions and tools is worth the while as long as they complement each other by reimbursing the gaps one can’t offer. Yet the number of used different providers shouldn’t be abused as the solutions can start conflict or consume more effort to maintain than initially intended.
Therefore, it’s always good to revise the priorities of the primary company needs and ensure the most straightforward way to achieve them. Oxylabs ensured they operated a sufficient number of dedicated servers that contained segregated traffic within high-security levels.
Oxylabs utilize multiple gateways dedicated to separate teams and locations to manage data transaction traffic within the network while maintaining the speed.
To improve the given speed capacity and eliminate any disturbances that appear with switching networks and locations of working colleagues on the road, Oxylabs tried adaptations of the same solution they were already using to find the best fit for their company’s needs. In this case, testing different VPN protocols proved to show significant differences with a few clicks.
NordLayer spent years designing and developing a WireGuard-based VPN protocol - NordLynx - to solve the speed problems for which OpenVPN or IKEv2 protocols were known. Testing allowed Oxylabs teams to run speed tests in distant countries and continents to ensure it’s a sustainable solution for their business.
VPN protocol proved speed endurance despite an actual distance how close or far away the employees were from a requested server.
Light-coded protocol of 4,000 code lines merges a shorter data transfer route and less attack surface without any need to compensate for expected security levels.
The Outcome
Speed advancements for a reliable service performance
Oxylabs uses NordLayer to combine several security features that stack on more impenetrable security for the company network. As hybrid work from different continents and countries is present, it’s mandatory to follow company security policies to cover additional risk levels.
Critical work systems like Salesforce or GitHub are available to employees only when connected to the company network and cannot be accessed from a random WiFi. It also has to be combined with user verification like 2FA.
Instead of reviewing and shortlisting several new solutions that might fit Oxylabs’ requirements to fix the latency problem, the company revised what NordLayer had to offer, saving decision-making time, especially if the enterprise needed a solution quickly.
Connection from Germany and the United Kingdom or Eastern Europe and the United States with NordLynx VPN protocol demonstrated up to 2 times better download and upload speed than other protocols — similar to what results were conveyed from NordLynx pre-launch testing project.
Speedtest records performed with the new NordLayer VPN protocol decreased once the distance between the servers and endpoints grew. Yet, it was still showing a considerably better result than before with the alternative protocols.
Now, with NordLynx, the solution completes our anticipation of a service to provide all-around security without compromising speed and performance.
It helped Oxylabs establish smooth internal operations that reflect overall product delivery to its customers, even having stationed and moving teams.
Interested in how many security and performance improvements are in hand-reach with NordLayer or want to try a single solution for your company that covers the network protection and what-comes-with-it pain points? Contact our team for more information.
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