University of Bahrain | College of IT | Department of Computer Engineering

Securing Remote Workforce: A Robust Solution Plan

"Redefining remote work infrastructures in the security context"

Abstract

This project presents a secure remote network solution plan designed to help organizations protect their internal assets while enabling a flexible remote workforce. Through an extensive literature review (2020–2025) and a survey of 170 respondents on cybersecurity awareness, we analyzed the most prevalent attacks in the remote work era and the essential security practices needed to mitigate them. We then evaluated four key technologies: SSL VPN, Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), SD-WAN, and SASE against criteria such as performance, scalability, deployment complexity, and trust model, and designed three integrated solution plans tailored to different organization sizes. The resulting frameworks balance security, cost, and usability, and highlight the central role of employee training, regulatory compliance, and phased deployment in securing remote environments.

Objectives

Conducting research on the best practices for remote work security.
Creating solutions that are practical, efficient, and can be easily deployed in different use cases.
Comparing different remote security approaches in literature that have proved adequate.
Finding the commonalities between approaches used in the market.
Researching the attacks most prevalent in the remote work era and the channels of exploitation used by attackers.

Methodology

Our project relied on secondary research of external sources for the analysis conducted and the solutions created. Below is a figure that summarizes all the steps that were taken to collect infrormation, how the information was used, and where the information was collected. Additionally, a survey was conducted to pool information about the public's general awareness of cybersecurity attacks that are most prevalent in the remote work era. The survey questions can be viewed here. This allowed us to collect some of our own information alongside the analysis conducted through secondary resources.

Final Solutions

**Solution 1: Small to medium sized businesses**

Most of the implementation utilizes SSL VPN configurations to leverage its low cost of deployment and maintenance, and its ease of use for small networks. The VPN servers are in a DMZ, and their functionalities and role in the architecture is defined in the table below. The function of the DMZ is to protect the traffic moving between the VPN servers to the internal network and the external, shared network, to the remote user. The firewalls protect both the internal network, and ensure that if there is malicious traffic infiltrating the system, it does not affect the remote worker as well.

**Solution 2: Large, multi-site enterprises**

This diagram shows how different remote workers can connect to the organization's branches and access internal resources through the SD-WAN fabric. This is through the use of SD-WAN edge devices and remote SD-WAN services such as vManage, vBond, and vAnalysis. This picture shows a basic implementation of a remote, SD-WAN network that provides one worker with access to an enterprise's multiple resources, including cloud services and company sites. It also shows how a system administrator can remotely manage the network using the afforementioned services.

**Solution 3: Large, cloud-integrable businesses**

This implementation is built off both the SD-WAN concept, but it more specifically considers how it can integrate into a cloud-native architecture. In this theoretical example, the organization has a private data center, and so each remote worker and internal worker must be provided with secure access to the cloud resources. In some cases, certain employees are given access to the data center, depending on job role and privileges. Additionally, the presence of different inspection points allows for continuous authentication and verification and also ensures that remote workers connecting from various geographic locations can benefit from reduced latency. The PoP device can also act as an SD-WAN appliance that helps interconnect the different sites in the SD-WAN fabric.

Conclusion

Through our research, we compared SSL VPN, ZTA, SD-WAN, and SASE across performance, scalability, deployment complexity, trust model, and typical use cases. This comparative analysis highlighted that no single technology solves the remote security problem on its own. Instead, combining them in different ways allows organizations to strike a balance between security, cost, and operational simplicity. SSL VPNs remain a practical choice for secure remote access, ZTA offers a “never trust, always verify” model suitable for hybrid environments, SD-WAN improves connectivity and segmentation across branches, and SASE extends ZTA-based controls into the cloud with globally distributed enforcement points.
Based on our findings, we designed three integrated solution plans: (1) a cost-effective SSL VPN–centric solution with fundamental Zero Trust principles for small to medium-sized businesses; (2) an enterprise-scale solution for multi-site organizations combining SSL VPN, ZTA, and SD-WAN to support branch connectivity and centralized management; and (3) a cloud-integrable approach for larger organizations that augments the previous elements with NGFWs, Secure Web Gateways (SWG), and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) within a SASE-style architecture. All three solutions share common strategies such as encryption in transit and at rest, MFA and RBAC, disaster recovery planning, secure communication channels, employee training, regulatory compliance, phased deployment, and continuous logging and auditing.

Limitations & Future Work

Our project has several limitations that can be addressed. The scope was intentionally broad, focusing on remote work implementations rather than a specific industry, use case, or organization. This generality makes the solutions more widely applicable but limits the level of detail for sector-specific compliance, threat models, and operational constraints.
A natural next step is to implement one or more of the proposed solutions in a test environment, using real or emulated infrastructure. Finally, as remote work technologies continue to evolve, further research should track and incorporate emerging trends such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) as a service, AI-driven anomaly detection, and deeper integration between endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools and cloud-based SASE platforms.