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
Windows 10 Always On VPN hands-on training classes now forming. Details 
Windows servers are required to implement DirectAccess. Always On VPN can be implemented using Windows servers as well, but it isn’t a hard requirement. Always On VPN is implemented entirely on the Windows 10 client, which means any third-party VPN device can be used on the back end, including Cisco, Checkpoint, Juniper, Palo Alto, Fortinet, SonicWALL, F5, strongSwan, and others! This provides tremendous deployment flexibility, making it possible to mix and match backend infrastructure if required. For example, a Windows RRAS VPN server with Palo Alto and SonicWALL firewalls could all be implemented at the same time (using the Windows built-in VPN client). Importantly, making changes to VPN infrastructure is much less impactful and disruptive to clients in the field. VPN devices can be upgraded, replaced, and moved internally without requiring corresponding policy changes on the client.
DirectAccess is a thing of beauty when everything is working as it should. When it isn’t, troubleshooting can be quite challenging. DirectAccess relies on many Windows platform technologies such as Active Directory for authentication, PKI for certificate management, group policy for settings deployment, IPsec for encryption, and IPv6 for transport. With so many dependencies, locating the source of the problem can be a difficult and daunting task.
