Tip of the Week - Split Tunnel for Office 365 or other SaaS Applications, How TO

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For the safety of their organizations and to help stop the spread of COVID-19/Coronavirus, our customers have moved all non-essential employees to work from home. The increase in volume of remote workers has resulted in considerable added load on Security Gateways, and customers are requesting guidance from Microsoft and Check Point on how to alleviate this additional workload while still maintaining an acceptable security posture.

Microsoft has made two recommendation to customers using Office 365 applications to optimize user experience:

1.    Split tunnel Office 365 applications instead of routing them over a VPN tunnel

2.    Split tunnel Office 365 applications using explicit “Optimized” Microsoft provided IP address ranges rather than split-tunneling using generic O365 FQDNs

This SecureKnowledge article describes how to achieve this when using a Check Point VPN client. While sending these connections directly to the Office 365 services alleviates the load on Check Point Security Gateways it also removes this traffic from the path of Threat Prevention inspection those same gateways provide. Customers should evaluate if split-tunneling this traffic meets their security posture needs.