If your organization is clinging to “free” licenses from the likes of Cisco AnyConnect or Palo Alto Networks GlogalProtect licenses bundled with your firewall, it’s time to ask the hard question: What’s the real cost? While those VPN licenses may seem like a budget-friendly choice, the truth is they're costing you in performance, productivity, support, and risk exposure.
In contrast, a modern cloud-first, edge native platform like Cloudbrink’s Personal SASE eliminates the hidden operational and security overhead associated with legacy VPN—and delivers simplicity, security, and speed as core design principles. The result: drastically lower support costs, improved user productivity, faster deployments, and a dramatically stronger security posture.
The Illusion of Free: What Are You Really Paying For?
While some VPN licenses may appear “free,” or low cost, they depend on a costly ecosystem:
- Firewalls: Expensive hardware that must scale with users and apps.
- Staffing Overhead: Multiple engineers needed to manage the hardware, policies, updates, and complex integrations.
- Support Burden: VPN reliability issues are a top source of help desk tickets.
- Performance Trade-offs: Hairpinning traffic through data centers introduces latency, frustrating users and slowing productivity or using split tunnels that leave your data exposed.
- Security Gaps: Static credentials, infrequent certificate rotation, and known zero-day vulnerabilities leave you exposed.
A leading insurance company that migrated off Cisco and Fortinet saw support tickets virtually eliminated and a data center decommissioning initiated within six months.
Cloudbrink: ROI That Goes Beyond License Cost
Cloudbrink’s Personal SASE is not just a VPN replacement—it’s a transformation of how secure remote access should work. And the results speak for themselves:
| Benefit | Traditional VPN | Cloudbrink |
| Support Load | Up to 80% of tickets from VPN issues | Up to 90% reduction in tickets |
| Deployment | Weeks to months | Minutes – no hardware |
| Bandwidth/user | Max 200 Mbps typical, reducing massively uner high loads | Up to 1 Gbps per user per device |
| Latency | 100+ ms with hairpinning | Median 5.2 ms via FAST Edges |
| Security | Static tunnels, patch cycle exposure | mTLS 1.3, 8-hr rotating certs, ZTNA with a Dynamic Invisible Network |
| Cost Transparency | Firewalls, licenses, bandwidth caps | One per-user price, no hidden fees |
Real-World Results: Measurable Savings and Productivity Gains
- A Fortune 100 gaming developer improved file transfer speeds by 30x, moving up to 8TB per day per user per device with Cloudbrink saving $3000 per user in productivity vs free Palo Alto GlobalProtect
- A national insurance company deployed to 850 users in under one week, eliminating VPN support calls and accelerating M&A integration saving $100,000’s vs Cisco AnyConnect.
- A global media firm replaced remote SD-WAN appliances and VPNs, improving remote performance while slashing hardware and support costs.
The Cost of VPN issues per 100 remote users Example
Studies show that disconnects and problems with connections are the biggest issues with VPNs followed by poor performance. The following is an example focuses on the specific issues as poor app performance is harder to quantify by simple math. You can change the numbers to come yp
Assumptions
- Issues/year: 100 users × 1/week × 48 weeks = 4,800
- Escalations/year: 12 (1/month) → Self-resolved: 4,800 − 12 = 4,788
- Average employee cost $50/hour
User productivity loss
- Self-resolved: 4,788 × 10 min = 47,880 min = 798 hrs → $39,900 (@ $50/hr)
- Escalated (user time): 12 × 10 min = 120 min = 2 hrs → $100
- User time total: 798 + 2 = 800 hrs → $40,000
Help Desk cost
- 120 30 minute tickets × $25 = $3,000
Annual impact
$40,000 (user time) + $3,000 (L1 tickets) = $43,000/year
Cost of a "Free VPN" = $430 per user per year at these assumptions.
Security by Design, Not as an Afterthought
Unlike VPNs, Cloudbrink is built on Zero Trust principles:
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- Dynamic, least-privilege access based on identity, device, and context
- Mutual TLS 1.3 encryption with 8-hour certificate rotation
- SDP-compliant, software-only solution with no public gateway exposure
- Integrated continuous posture checks and SSO with platforms like Microsoft Entra and CrowdStrike
And unlike firewalls, Cloudbrink FAST Edges don’t create bottlenecks or single points of failure—they’re spun up dynamically within 5–20ms of every user.
Simplicity That Shrinks Your Stack—and Your Costs
Cloudbrink consolidates what legacy solutions spread across multiple tools:
- ZTNA, VPN, SD-WAN, firewalling, and performance optimization in one lightweight app
- Zero hardware. No uCPE. No data center dependency.
- A single cloud-based policy engine and console
- Flat-rate per-user pricing—no bandwidth taxes, device charges, or complex bundles
Still Think “Free” Is Free?
When you account for:
- Security incidents
- Downtime and helpdesk escalations
- Productivity losses
- Infrastructure sprawl
- Administrative complexity
…the true cost of “free” VPN is staggeringly high.
It's Time to Reinvest in the Right Future
With Cloudbrink, you trade complexity for clarity—and transform remote access from a cost center into a productivity engine.
Book a strategy session today to calculate your true ROI.
