OpenVPN for Business Remote Access: A Practitioner's Guide
Introduction
OpenVPN has been quietly securing business traffic since 2001, which in networking terms makes it ancient and trusted in equal measure. It is the VPN we reach for when a client wants control, vendor independence and no per-seat surprises. This is our practical take on where OpenVPN fits in 2026, written for the business owner deciding how their team should reach the office network from home, the road or a client site.
OpenVPN, explained without the hype
OpenVPN is two things wearing one name. It is a protocol, an open, audited way of building an encrypted tunnel using the same TLS technology that secures your bank's website. It is also the software that implements it, available as the free, open-source Community Edition and the commercial Access Server.
The protocol's real-world strength is that it is flexible about how it travels. It can run over UDP for speed or over TCP port 443 when it needs to slip through a restrictive hotel, airport or public Wi-Fi firewall that blocks everything else. For a field engineer working out of coffee shops around South Wales, that resilience is not a footnote; it is the difference between connecting and giving up.
Community Edition vs Access Server
This is the choice that trips people up, so let us be clear.
Community Edition is free and open source with no vendor-imposed connection limit. It is configured entirely through files and the command line, so it rewards a confident Linux administrator and punishes everyone else. If you have the in-house skill, it is genuinely capable and costs nothing but time.
Access Server is the commercial product. It adds a web admin interface, a client portal, easier user management and official support. In its unlicensed state it allows two simultaneous connections for free, which is fine for testing but not for a team. Beyond that you buy connections: subscription licences start from three connections, fixed one-year licences from ten, and pay-as-you-go options exist on the major cloud platforms. Licences are counted by simultaneous VPN tunnels, not named users, so a person connecting a laptop and a phone at once uses two.
We deploy both. Community Edition suits businesses that want to own every layer and have the skills to run it. Access Server suits those who would rather pay for a clean management interface and a support contract, and let us handle the underlying host.
Where OpenVPN beats WireGuard-based options
WireGuard is excellent, and options built on it (including Ubiquiti's Teleport) are wonderfully simple. So why still choose OpenVPN? A few honest reasons:
- Firewall traversal. OpenVPN over TCP 443 looks like ordinary web traffic and gets through networks that silently drop WireGuard's UDP.
- Granular control. Certificate-based authentication, per-user access rules, pushed routes and directory integration are mature and well documented.
- Vendor neutrality. It runs on hardware you choose, on-premises or in any cloud, with no dependence on a single manufacturer's ecosystem.
- Auditability. Two decades of open scrutiny is a security feature in its own right.
Where WireGuard-based tools win is out-of-the-box simplicity and, until recently, speed. That speed gap has now largely closed.
DCO: OpenVPN got fast
For years the fair criticism of OpenVPN was that it was slower than WireGuard because it processed encryption in user space. Data Channel Offload (DCO) changed that by moving the heavy lifting into a kernel module. The OpenVPN 2.7 release line, first released in February 2026, adds support for the upstream ovpn kernel module that was merged into mainline Linux and ships from kernel 6.16 onward.
The result is real. Benchmarks have shown roughly double the throughput with DCO enabled versus legacy OpenVPN, and in some independent tests OpenVPN with DCO now edges ahead of WireGuard on the same hardware. For most businesses the practical takeaway is simple: on modern kit, OpenVPN speed is no longer a reason to rule it out.
What we deploy OpenVPN for
Across our South Wales client base, OpenVPN tends to land in a few clear situations. A software company that wants to avoid per-user licensing and keep its VPN entirely under its own roof gets a hardened Access Server tied into their identity provider. A business with a mix of Windows, macOS and Linux laptops values the consistent, cross-platform client. An organisation whose staff regularly work from locked-down partner sites relies on the TCP 443 fallback to get through.
We handle the parts that go wrong when this is done casually: certificate lifecycle, tight firewall rules so the VPN only exposes what it should, multi-factor authentication, and keeping the server patched. That last point matters. The 2.7 line has already shipped security fixes, including patches in 2.7.2 for a TLS handshake race condition and a malformed-packet crash, so an unpatched VPN server is a liability rather than a defence.
Is OpenVPN right for you?
Choose OpenVPN when you value control and independence over turnkey simplicity, when your staff connect from unpredictable networks, or when per-seat licensing does not sit well with your budget. If your network is built end to end on UniFi, Teleport may get you there faster, and if you need enterprise posture and identity controls, Cisco Secure Client is worth the licence. Our pillar guide to remote-access VPN solutions puts all three side by side.
We design and run OpenVPN as part of our firewall and VPN service for businesses across Cardiff, Swansea, Bridgend and Newport. If you want it deployed properly and kept patched, get in touch for a free consultation and we will map the right setup for your team.