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Microsoft—and Ars—advise split-tunnel VPNs to minimize coronavirus woes:
When SARS hit its peak, remote work wasn't yet practical enough for quarantine efforts to affect office networks much. With the coronavirus, though, most of the toolset needed to work from home or the road is available—but many office networks are having difficulty handling the sudden increase in scale.
There's not much you can do about a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection that isn't robust enough to handle traffic from remote workers to internal infrastructure such as file servers and application servers. But much of a typical company's infrastructure isn't onsite at all anymore—it's increasingly likely to be hosted in the cloud, behind its own set of protective firewalls and filters.
Traditionally, most office VPNs are set up to route not just office traffic, but all traffic—including Internet-destined traffic—across the user's VPN tunnel. For most sites, that means paying a double penalty—or worse—for all Internet traffic from VPN-connected users. Each HTTPS request and its subsequent response must hit both the upload and download side of the office's WAN twice. This is bad enough with a symmetric WAN—e.g., a 500Mbps fiber link—but it's beyond punishing for an asymmetric WAN, such as a 100Mbps-down/10Mbps-up coaxial link.
[...] We generally advise routing only office-bound traffic over an office VPN and allowing all Internet traffic to proceed directly to its destination—this can easily reduce VPN traffic by an order of magnitude or more, and the router-level filtering and monitoring in most offices isn't particularly useful in the first place.
Doing things this way is simple—the network administrator disables global routing in their VPN configurations and only routes the office's subnet(s) across the tunnel. The details vary by VPN implementation, but in Cisco VPN clients, for example, it's a simple checkbox to be ticked on or off.
[...] IPv6, unfortunately, gets its usual "eh, maybe later" treatment—Microsoft advises that IPv6 endpoints can simply be ignored and notes that its services "will currently operate successfully on IPv4 only, but not the other way around."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @09:18PM (1 child)
Actually, this happens quite often when the systems in question are so heavily locked down that the users have trouble doing their jobs properly. It usually starts with someone physically taking something out accidentally (due to portability, maintenance, etc), and then realising their life is now much less painful.
(Score: 5, Funny) by sjames on Friday March 13 2020, @09:43PM
It's a classic security problem. At a building I used to work in, they had reasonable enough security practices and people tended to comply. Then they decided to tighten things down for "reasons". Suddenly you couldn't even go out for a coffee in the Starbucks on an outside corner of the same business without the full sign out then sign back in, etc.
A week later I saw that a side door was propped open with a bucket and the door sensor was bypassed. There was a quick tacit agreement among the people who worked there that we don't talk about the side door with the bucket.