Accessing electronic resources from outside the corporate network: Proxy or VPN?

[Thomas Ward]

I would not consider NGINX a proxy in the form you're looking for - it's not designed to work as a "proxy" server in the sense of what you're looking for, and VPN + internal proxy is the better solution for access to resources subscribed to a company (but that's outside the scope of NGINX and is more my opinion as a security guy).

Thomas


-----Original Message-----
From: nginx <nginx-bounces at nginx.org> On Behalf Of Mauro Tridici
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2023 10:18 AM
To: nginx at nginx.org
Subject: Accessing electronic resources from outside the corporate network: Proxy or VPN?

Dear Users,

my boss asked me to implemented a proxy service in order to allow corporate users to access electronic resources, subscribed by our company, also from outside the corporate network (you know, users can work both from office and from home). 
Unfortunately, I’m a newbie and I’m a little bit confused.
Surfing on the web, I read that:

- proxy is not a secure choice;
- all the web traffic generated by the users working from home will overload the proxy;
- proxy is not able to encrypt the internet traffic;

From the other side, a VPN seems to be the preferred solution:

- VPN provides better performance and security level;
- VPN solution assumes a strong authentication process;
- VPN can be used to route only specific traffic/IP addresses through VPN tunnel

Are these assumptions true? Can I use NGINX to implemented the needed proxy? Or should I prefer the VPN based solution.
What are your suggestions about this scenario? Have you had any experience with such a topic?

Could you please help me to identify the right solution and best (implementation) practices?
If you have any reference links to study, please feel free to share them.

Many thank in advance,
Mauro
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