How moving away from VPN and into a cloud-based solution will improve workflow and connect your offices.

A cloud-based solution solves all the font-related issues that come with VPN use. It allows your team members access to a large library of fonts wherever they might be, as soon as they need it.

VPNs: Secure, but difficult to use.

The security a VPN provides often comes at the cost of efficiency. VPNs are notorious for slowing connections down — the root of most font- and other design-related issues, like the ones below.

Accessing fonts is time-consuming.

Using thousands of fonts on a VPN-protected server can be a pain, especially if your company VPN tends to slow your connections down to a crawl. This is especially detrimental to global teams — a slower wifi connection will make it difficult (if not impossible) for some creatives to get ready access to all the fonts for their designs. 

A VPN also makes font management difficult, even with a dedicated management service. While some asset management platforms give you a way to store and organize your fonts, you would still need to upload and download the fonts you need, a challenge for anyone who’s bogged down by a slower wifi connection.

Sharing fonts is a bottleneck.

As we’ve established, a VPN tends to slow things down. You can feel this especially when requesting, sending, and receiving files.

For most agencies, this process often requires you to find out who has the file. If you’re lucky, the response is quick; however, waiting for hours (if not days) for a teammate to get back to you is also pretty common. People work in different time zones, go on leave, forget to answer emails, or even leave the company (without being deleted from the system), so any process that involves back-and-forth with another person is a possible bottleneck.

Keeping your font library up-to-date becomes an issue.

Unless your organization has a system that automatically updates all your font files, someone has to take on the task of replacing every single font in your library with the most up-to-date version. Updating your font library won’t be a one-person task if your organization stores thousands of font files in one or across multiple folders, so your creatives would have to check whether they’re using the most updated version of the file before they use it on a project, and take on the task of updating the file (and licensing it, if needed). All of this has to be done while on a slow, possibly unstable VPN connection. 

While it’s tempting to just use whatever version of the font is available, this can cause design inconsistencies. One designer might have an up-to-date version of the font on their personal machine and neglect to update the font file on the server (why should anyone bother, if uploading is so slow?) Another designer then uses a different version of the file on the same project, and the next thing you know, the client is asking why the fonts used on the webpage look slightly different from the fonts on the ad.

Font discovery is a hassle.

Looking for the right fonts for a project requires a designer to scroll through multiple sites, and depending on how stringent your security policies are, your VPN blocks might be making this task a bit more bothersome for your creatives. 

Technical issues mean delays.

Depending on how your company VPN is set up, you’re bound to encounter technical issues from time to time. If a VPN is a prerequisite to accessing your company’s font library, issues and outages mean no work gets done while the system is down. This means that if your VPN connection drops while you’re halfway through a 200-font mass upload, you’re going to have to start over.

VPNs also tie font access to a specific device. Someone who’s working remotely won’t be able to use the fonts they need if their company-issued device fails (at least not until the device is replaced, which might take a few days).

All of this means projects get paused, deadlines get missed, and in the worst case, clients get disappointed.

How Monotype Fonts streamlines the way you use fonts.

Cloud-based solutions like Monotype Fonts ensure your team always has secure access to the fonts they need, anytime. The Monotype Desktop App even eliminates the need to download fonts — the “sync” feature detects missing fonts on most design platforms and automatically fills them in. Work continues despite outages or VPN-related issues. If they experience issues with their company-issued devices, creatives can easily switch to another one, and get the same secure access to the font library.

With a Monotype Fonts subscription, your team doesn’t just have ready access to your company fonts, they can discover over 150,000, updated, ready-to-use fonts as well. There’s no need to scroll through potentially harmful free-font sites because they have one of the largest libraries right at their fingertips.

In a lot of ways, a Monotype Fonts subscription makes more financial sense for your team than a VPN or an on-premise solution. The cost for a subscription is predictable, and having a cloud-based solution means you’ll have an established company such as Monotype Fonts take care of security maintenance for you. Deployment is easy, too — you won’t have to set up users manually, saving you money on complex IT support. 

The best part? Cloud services like Monotype Fonts will help you save on energy costs and reduce your carbon footprint. Instead of you carrying the monetary and environmental cost of maintaining your on-premise servers, cloud-based service providers have more efficient, energy-saving infrastructure.

To learn more about how Monotype Fonts can be a better alternative to a VPN-based cloud solution, drop us a line and we’ll get in touch.