Remote-Access VPN Solutions for Business: How to Choose
Introduction
Hybrid working is normal now, and so is the question we hear most often from businesses across South Wales: how do people reach the office network safely when they are not in the office? A remote-access VPN is still the honest answer for most firms. It builds an encrypted tunnel from a laptop or phone back to your network, so a staff member in Cardiff, Swansea or a hotel in Manchester can use internal systems as if they were sat at their desk.
The trouble is that "VPN" covers a lot of ground, and the marketing rarely tells you where the trade-offs are. This guide sets out the two shapes of VPN, the questions we ask before recommending anything, and an honest comparison of the three products we deploy most.
Remote-access vs site-to-site: the difference that matters
People muddle these two, so it is worth being precise.
A site-to-site VPN links whole networks together. Your Bridgend office and your Newport office get a permanent encrypted link between their firewalls, and every device on each side can talk to the other without any client software. Nobody logs in; the tunnel is always up.
A remote-access VPN connects one person's device to the network. The user runs a client (or, in some cases, taps a link), authenticates, and gets a tunnel that lasts as long as their session. This is what you want for home workers, field engineers and anyone travelling.
Most businesses end up needing both. If your question is "how do my branch offices share a file server", that is site-to-site. If it is "how does Sarah reach the CRM from her kitchen table", that is remote access, and that is what the rest of this article is about.
How to choose: the questions we ask first
Before we recommend a product, we work through a short list with you:
- Who connects, and how many at once? Five directors or two hundred staff changes everything.
- What hardware do you already run? If your network is built on UniFi, Cisco or a general-purpose firewall, that heavily shapes the sensible choice.
- What do you need to reach? Full access to the whole LAN, or just a couple of applications?
- Who manages it day to day? A confident in-house admin can run something the average small business would want us to handle.
- What are your compliance obligations? Posture checks, logging and certificate-based auth matter more in regulated sectors.
There is no single winner. The right answer is the one that matches your kit, your team and your risk appetite.
The three we deploy most
OpenVPN
OpenVPN is the mature, open, protocol-and-software combination that has been securing business traffic for two decades. It runs as a free, self-hosted Community Edition or as the web-managed Access Server, and it travels well through awkward hotel and public firewalls because it can ride over TCP port 443. Historically its weak spot was raw speed, but the 2.7 release line and Data Channel Offload have closed most of that gap. It suits businesses that want vendor independence and are comfortable running a Linux host, or having us run it for them.
Ubiquiti Teleport
If your network already runs on UniFi, Teleport is close to free money. It is a WireGuard-based, one-click remote-access VPN built into UniFi OS gateways, and it needs no port forwarding, firewall rules or certificates. You share a link, the user taps it in the WiFiman app, and they are on the network. It is brilliant for small teams and quick access, but it is deliberately simple, which shows once you need to manage lots of users.
Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect)
Cisco Secure Client is the enterprise option, and yes, it is the product most people still call AnyConnect. Cisco renamed it at version 5 back in 2022. It pairs with Cisco Secure Firewall or a Meraki MX and brings serious identity, posture and endpoint controls to the table. It is licensed per user across two tiers, so it costs real money, but for a regulated or larger organisation that scale and control is exactly the point.
An honest comparison
None of these is "best" in the abstract. Here is how we tend to place them:
- Smallest cost, simplest setup, already on UniFi: Teleport wins, provided your user count is modest and you can live with its limits.
- Vendor-neutral, self-hosted, want control without per-user fees: OpenVPN is hard to beat, especially now DCO has made it quick.
- Larger headcount, compliance pressure, existing Cisco or Meraki estate: Cisco Secure Client earns its licence cost through posture checks, granular policy and mature identity integration.
A ten-person marketing agency and a hundred-seat manufacturer with ISO obligations should not be running the same VPN. Matching the tool to the business is the whole job.
What we deploy each one for
In practice, the pattern across our South Wales clients looks like this. A café group or a small professional-services firm on Ubiquiti kit gets Teleport switched on in an afternoon. A software house that wants to own its stack and avoid per-seat licensing gets OpenVPN Access Server on a hardened Linux box, tied into their directory. A regulated business already invested in Cisco or Meraki gets Secure Client, because the posture and logging tick compliance boxes the cheaper options simply do not.
Whichever route fits, we treat the VPN as one layer, not the whole strategy. Strong authentication, tight firewall rules and sensible network segmentation all sit alongside it, which is why remote access lives inside our wider firewall and VPN service.
Getting it right in South Wales
We design, deploy and support all three across Cardiff, Swansea, Bridgend, Newport and the surrounding areas, and we back them with remote support so problems get fixed without a site visit. The best remote-access VPN is the one your team actually uses without friction and that you can trust when someone connects from an unknown network.
If you are weighing up the options, get in touch for a free, no-obligation consultation. We will look at your existing kit, your headcount and your compliance needs, and recommend the approach that genuinely fits rather than the one with the biggest brochure.