Remote work is no longer a pandemic-era experiment. It’s a permanent feature of how Carolina businesses operate — and one that many IT managers are always scrambling to secure properly.
According to recent cybersecurity research, the average business cost of breaches linked to remote workers is $1.07 million higher than those involving on-site employees. And the home office itself has become a meaningful attack surface: 29% of total ransomware attacks in 2025 originated from home office environments.
Yet most companies hand a remote employee a laptop, point them toward a consumer VPN app, and call it a day. That approach leaves a critical gap, and it’s one that’s hiding in plain sight.
The Real Problem Isn’t the VPN App. It’s the Network Underneath It.
A VPN application encrypts the tunnel between a remote worker’s device and your corporate network. What it doesn’t do is secure, monitor, or control the internet connection that tunnel runs over.
That connection, typically a residential ISP line or whatever Wi-Fi the employee happens to be on, is largely invisible to IT. You can’t see its signal quality. You can’t audit which devices share it. You can’t enforce security policies on the router it flows through. You can’t push firmware updates or quarantine a compromised endpoint. And you almost certainly can’t tell when something goes wrong until a user calls the help desk.
Misconfigured VPNs led to 14% of data leaks among remote workers in 2025. Most of those misconfigurations weren’t intentional, they were the predictable result of no one having visibility or control over the network infrastructure at the edge.
This is the blind spot. And it’s exactly where Connect Path’s 5G fixed wireless service, delivered through Inseego hardware and the Inseego Connect management platform, fills the gap.
A Managed Edge, Not Just a Consumer Router
When Connect Path provisions a remote worker’s connection using an Inseego 5G router, such as the Wavemaker FX4200, the device your employee uses is not a consumer product with a password on a sticky note. It’s an enterprise-grade network endpoint that your IT team fully controls.
The FX4200 features enterprise security with FIPS 140-3 compliance, built-in VPN support, zero-touch setup, and an advanced routing stack with policy control for enterprise environments. These aren’t add-on features, they’re foundational to how the device operates from the moment it’s powered on.
Zero-touch provisioning means that when a new device ships to a remote employee, it automatically authenticates with Inseego Connect and auto-applies all necessary templates, security, and firmware on first boot, enabling seamless, remote deployment without requiring IT staff to visit the employee’s home or walk them through a complex setup.
For the IT manager, this means every remote connection can be provisioned to the same security baseline as your branch offices, automatically, before anyone uses the device for work.
What IT Managers Can Actually See and Control
The Inseego Connect cloud platform is where operational visibility comes together. The dashboard provides a real-time, single-pane-of-glass view of your entire inventory, including device health and status, data usage, signal quality, connection history, GPS location tracking, and the ability to perform remote speed tests for performance verification.
That level of visibility matters in practical terms. When a remote employee reports a slow connection, your team can run a speed test from the dashboard rather than dispatching someone or relying on the employee’s own diagnosis. When a device goes offline unexpectedly, you see it immediately, not when the user eventually notices.
The security management capabilities go further than visibility alone. The platform supports Multi-Factor Authentication for end-user access, user permissions, remote enforcement of VPN policies using IPsec and OpenVPN, GPS-based geofencing alerts to detect unauthorized device movement, and over-the-air firmware updates to ensure devices always have the latest security patches.
For organizations managing dozens or hundreds of remote employees across the Carolinas, configuration templates allow IT teams to group devices together and push widespread changes, such as security policy updates, firmware upgrades, and network parameter adjustments, across hundreds or thousands of devices simultaneously.
This is the difference between managing a remote workforce and hoping the remote workforce stays secure.
VPN at the Router Level: A Stronger Posture
Most consumer VPN setups require the end user to do something: launch an app, authenticate, connect. That introduces human failure points. An employee who forgets to activate their VPN, or who connects from a personal device that doesn’t have it installed, is transmitting corporate data in the clear.
Inseego’s enterprise approach moves VPN enforcement to the router itself. Inseego Connect provides comprehensive support for IPSec and enables the creation of secure VPN tunnels that are vital for remote workers, with centralized security management allowing remote configuration and monitoring of IPSec VPN tunnels for secure and scalable connections.
Administrators can remotely configure and manage all IPSec VPN tunnels from a single, cloud-based interface, eliminating the need for on-site visits and manual setup. The platform supports Full-Tunnel VPN Routing, DNS-Based Peer IPSec, and IKEv2 Support, providing greater flexibility and security for integrating with third-party cloud services.
When VPN enforcement lives at the network layer, not the application layer, it’s always on. The employee doesn’t have to remember anything. And your IT team can audit and verify tunnel status from the dashboard at any time.
Reliability That Supports Compliance, Not Just Productivity
For businesses in regulated industries, financial services in Charlotte, healthcare providers across the Triangle, manufacturers in the Greenville-Spartanburg corridor, “visibility” isn’t just an operational preference. It’s a compliance requirement.
Policy enforcement and auditing capabilities in Inseego Connect include scheduling updates, enforcing network rules, and reviewing change logs for governance. Built-in security, including IPSec VPN, encrypted tunnels, and role-based access, minimizes the cost and risk associated with data breaches and compliance failures.
The FX4200’s FIPS 140-3 certification is particularly relevant here. FIPS 140-3 is the federal government’s cryptographic security standard, used as a baseline by many regulated industries. Having it built into the router, not bolted on through a third-party solution, means your remote employees’ connections meet stringent security requirements from the network up.
What This Looks Like for Your Remote Workforce
Here’s the practical picture for a Carolina company using Connect Path’s 5G service with Inseego hardware:
Day one. A new remote employee receives an Inseego router. They plug it in. The device automatically contacts Inseego Connect, authenticates, and loads your organization’s security template, including VPN configuration, Wi-Fi settings, and firewall policies. The employee does nothing beyond plugging it in.
Ongoing. Your IT team sees every device in a single dashboard. Signal strength, data usage, connection status, and VPN tunnel health are all visible in real time. Firmware updates push automatically. Security policy changes apply to all remote devices simultaneously.
When something goes wrong. Your team receives an alert, or spots an anomaly in the dashboard, before a user calls the help desk. You can remotely reboot the device, run a diagnostic speed test, or reconfigure a VPN tunnel without dispatching anyone.
If a device is compromised or goes missing. GPS tracking and geofencing alerts flag unauthorized movement. You can remotely push new credentials or lock the device from the dashboard.
The Bottom Line
The era of handing remote employees a laptop and a VPN app is over, or it should be. The threat landscape has evolved, the compliance requirements have tightened, and the expectation that consumer-grade home networks are “good enough” for corporate use was never well-founded.
Connect Path’s 5G fixed wireless service, built on Inseego’s enterprise router hardware and the Inseego Connect cloud management platform, gives IT managers something they’ve never had for remote worker connections: genuine control.
Not just a faster connection. A managed, visible, policy-enforced enterprise network edge, delivered to wherever your employees work.
Connect Path provides 5G fixed wireless internet to businesses and remote workers across the Carolinas, including Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, and the Greenville-Spartanburg market. To learn more about our managed connectivity options for remote teams, call us at 980-247-9797 or email [email protected].