DirectAccess administrators may be required to enable Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliant algorithms for encryption, hashing, and signing on DirectAccess servers to meet certain regulatory and compliance requirements.

Performance Impact

Be advised that enabling this setting will disable support for null cipher suites for the IP-HTTPS IPv6 transition technology. This will result in the double encryption of all DirectAccess client communication, which will increase resource consumption on DirectAccess servers. This leads to reduced scalability and degraded performance for all DirectAccess clients, including Windows 8.x and Windows 10.

If enabling FIPS compliant cannot be avoided, additional compute capacity (CPU and memory) should be provisioned. For best results, add additional servers to distribute the workload and improve performance for DirectAccess clients.

Always On VPN

If you’re looking for better security and performance, consider migrating to Windows 10 Always On VPN. Always On VPN fully supports FIPS compliant algorithms without the negative performance impact associated with DirectAccess. If you’d like to learn more about security and Always On VPN, fill out the form below and I’ll get in touch with you.

Additional Resources

Always On VPN and the Future of DirectAccess 

5 Things DirectAccess Administrators Should Know About Always On VPN 

3 Important Advantages of Always On VPN over DirectAccess