Ideas/Views on pfSense as a cloud Openvpn "collector"

[nighthawk]

Hi all,

Bit of background, Small-ish company supporting remote vpn connections to access internal resources and allow remote machine support. We have a growing number of VPN connections (now about 30 expected to grow to 50 quite quickly).

For a couple of years now we have used a CARP setup on local site. 2.3.* whatever the latest security release is. Equipment is definetely overspecced in terms of capability/processing power etc, however we need to upgrade the hardware to cope with 2.4 changes (requirement for AES-NI or equivalent on chip).

This upgrade and the prospect of the need for higher availability on remote support (local area power cut means no connectivity) means we are thinking of moving the Openvpn server element to the cloud.

We have had some internal discussion around this but wanted to know if anyone had done this?

Would you move to a platform such as Digital Ocean (if compatibility is possible). I've costed up some other hosting platforms (AWS etc) and in terms of bandwidth used it may not be worth it.

Also when overseas our VPN is not neccessarily blocked by certain countries as we host it locally rather than woth a VPS provider and I have heard that VPN providers often have trouble if hosted on VPS and their user is for example in China (we have users that may visit China for the business hence mentioning this).

Also how would you go about securing your pfsense instance in the cloud as say compared to the local setup.
Any particular pitfalls you may have noticed.

Basically we may like to seperate the availability of support from the vulnerability of a single local site as we have business requirements to meet.

If I can think of anything else i'll add it but interested to hear views of anyone with this type of setup.

Thanks in advance.