Fifty percent of your team is at the office, the other half of them is on time-zones, and everybody must have the same 8 GB photoshop and CAD files - yesterday. Sound familiar? Speed is the biggest grievance I am going to hear among the IT managers in 2025, and it is not security or cost. OneDrive takes two hours to complete a sync, engineers lament about Dropbox slowing down, and someone has always e-mailed a 300 MB file because it was quicker.

The good news: you can provide all your remote employees with a real-LAN-speed access to your central file server or NAS located anywhere on the globe, and that the sync conflicts are zero, full encryption, and nearly no effect on the home internet of the employee. A duly configured VPN gateway is the one which had eventually brought an end to the mess that we (as well as many mid-size companies this year) were in.

Why Consumer Cloud Sync Tools Fall Apart with Hybrid Teams

OneDrive, Google Drive, and dropbox are brilliant in the case of documents and small assets, but they were never built to support multi-gigabyte binary files into which creative, engineering and media teams live, version conflicts ruin locked Adobe and Autodesk files, and compliance departments run amok the moment controlled data goes outside your network. Home upload speeds are very unlikely to go beyond 50 Mbps, and version conflicts wreak havoc on locked Adobe and Autodesk files. The result? Shadow IT goes out of control, deadlines are missed and all hate the sync folder.

The Old Ways That No Longer Work in 2025

Direct opening of SMB port 445 to the internet is an immediate audit failure. Conventional full-tunnel client VPNs (Cisco AnyConnect, old OpenVPN, Pulse Secure) redirect all YouTube videos and Spotify tracks straight down the office line and destroys battery duration and employees turn off VPN as soon as the meeting is over. Zero-trust access applications are beautiful with web applications, but they do crawl when dragging a 12 GB folder across the tunnel. Also read We Moved to Microsoft 365 But Printing Stopped Working – The 2025 Fix No One Talks About

How a Modern VPN Gateway Makes Remote File Access Feel Like You’re in the Office

A VPN gateway is a device placed on the border of your network and establishes a high-speed and encrypted tunnel to all of your remote workers. Newer protocols such as WireGuard and IKEv2 routinely achieve 800-1200 Mbps of actual throughput on a commodity-priced device in 2025. Since it is possible to default split tunneling then only the traffic to your file server will pass through the tunnel - the Netflix and that traffic will fly at full LAN speed.

Whenever an employee connects his mapped network drive, across the VPN gateway, Windows begs and begs SMB 3.1.1 multi-channel, persistent file handles, and directory lease as though they were a ten feet away across the NAS. No longer file in use errors, no longer wait till the cloud is synced.

Real-World Speed Results We Measured in November 2025

Remote workers over a typical home 3001000 Mbps plan on a 1 Gbps symmetric office fiber connection with a Netgate 8200 as the VPN gateway achieved a steady 110-140 MB/s read and write over the file server. It is approximately one-tenth the speed of OneDrive and dropbox uploads and three times quicker than the outdated IPsec full-tunnel Cisco ASA that we substituted. A project folder of 10 GB that took 45 minutes to transfer before, now takes less than four.

Choosing the Right VPN Gateway for Your Company Size

Small teams under thirty people can be up and running in an afternoon with Tailscale or ZeroTier layered on top of an existing Synology or QNAP NAS. Mid-size companies (30–250 users) get the best price-performance from dedicated appliances like pfSense/Netgate, Sophos XGS, or Azure VPN Gateway in point-to-site mode. Larger or multi-site organizations usually standardise on FortiGate, Palo Alto GlobalProtect, or Cisco Catalyst 8300 series with SD-WAN policies that automatically choose the fastest VPN gateway location.

Security That Actually Passes Audits

All connections are secured with an end-to-end connection using ChaCha20-Poly1305 or AES-256-GCM encryption and compulsory multi-factor authentication by the VPN gateway tier. No ports are ever opened on employee home routers, full session logs are sent to your SIEM and split tunneling is permitted explicitly as only approved internal subnets are routed. HIPAA auditors, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 have ceased questioning this set-up. For more information visit Webvaior.

Simple Tricks to Squeeze Even More Speed

Enable jumbo frames across the entire path, upgrade your file server backbone to 10 Gbps with NVMe storage, and only turn on SMB signing if your regulator forces you (it costs about 15 % performance). For traveling employees, spin up a second lightweight VPN gateway instance in a nearby cloud region so latency never exceeds 30 ms.

The Bottom Line in 2025

The best, safest, and most dependable method of trading huge files with a hybrid team is not another cloud sync service but giving all of them a direct, encrypted, and fast method to access your central storage via a modern VPN gateway. We reduced the transfer times by one-third, removed version conflicts, ceased the use of Shadow IT file sharing, and workers ceased to turn off their VPN as soon as the call was over.