For decades, securing remote access followed a fairly understandable logic. Keep important systems within a protected network, build a strong perimeter around it, and provide authorized people with a secure way in when they need to work remotely.
The VPN became central to that model. By creating an encrypted connection between a device and a remote network, it helped employees work from home, connect safely while traveling, and reach internal resources without exposing traffic to anyone watching the connection.
That model hasn’t disappeared, but the environment around it has changed dramatically. Employees may now move between office networks, home Wi-Fi and public connections while using cloud applications that were never inside the corporate network in the first place. Contractors need temporary access. Staff use multiple devices. Sensitive information moves between software platforms run by different providers.
Cybersecurity is therefore shifting from a relatively simple question — “Is this person inside our network?” — toward a more demanding one: “Should this user, on this device, be allowed to access this particular resource right now?”
That change is where Zero Trust enters the picture.
The VPN Still Solves a Real Security Problem
It’s easy to interpret the rise of Zero Trust as evidence that VPN technology has reached the end of its useful life. That would be an oversimplification.
VPNs remain valuable because encrypted connections remain valuable. Someone working from an airport, hotel, or café may not know who controls the local network or how well it’s secured. Encrypting internet traffic reduces exposure on untrusted networks.
Consumer VPNs address this connection-level problem particularly clearly. If you’re among those people who want to understand how a VPN behaves on your own devices before deciding whether it suits your needs, for example, you can test CyberGhost VPN risk-free. In a business environment, meanwhile, VPN technology has traditionally served another purpose: providing a secure tunnel into private company infrastructure.
The weakness isn’t necessarily the tunnel itself. The problem appears when successful authentication is treated as sufficient evidence that everything happening through that tunnel can be trusted.
Imagine an employee whose VPN credentials are stolen through a convincing phishing email. The encrypted connection still works exactly as designed. Unfortunately, it may now be encrypting an attacker’s traffic.
That distinction matters. Encryption protects data in transit; it does not establish whether the person sending that data should have access to every system reachable through the connection.
Networks Have Become Harder to Put Behind a Wall
Traditional perimeter security made more sense when employees, applications and data were concentrated in predictable locations. A company might operate its own servers, keep staff inside a corporate building and tightly control the computers connected to its network.
Modern organizations are far messier.
A marketing employee might use a cloud-based analytics platform, communicate through another provider’s collaboration software and access company documents stored in yet another cloud environment. A developer may connect to infrastructure hosted hundreds of miles from the company’s physical office. External consultants might need one application for three months without requiring access to anything else.
In this environment, simply establishing that someone has crossed the network perimeter reveals less than it once did.
Zero Trust responds by reducing the importance of that perimeter. Instead of assuming that a user or device becomes trustworthy upon entering a protected network, access decisions can be made based on individual identities, devices, applications, and resources.
The practical difference is significant. An accountant who needs access to financial software does not automatically need visibility into engineering systems. A contractor assigned to one project doesn’t require broad access to internal resources simply because their login is legitimate.
Security becomes more granular.
The Endpoint Matters as Much as the Connection
Identity is only part of the problem. A legitimate employee can be using a compromised laptop, an outdated operating system, or a device with poorly configured security controls.
This is why secure remote access increasingly depends on understanding the endpoint’s condition.
Organizations can consider factors such as whether a device is managed, whether required security updates have been installed, and whether its behavior suddenly looks unusual. Readers interested in that side of the security equation can explore our piece “End Point Cyber Security – What You Need to Know” for a closer look at why individual devices have become such an important part of organizational defense.
This also exposes one of the limitations of thinking about remote security primarily in terms of connections. A perfectly encrypted tunnel from an infected computer doesn’t make the computer safe.
The same principle applies to identity. Multi-factor authentication can make stolen passwords less useful, while carefully designed permissions can limit the damage if an account is compromised. None of these controls replaces encryption. They solve different parts of the same problem.
From Network Access to Application Access
One of the most important changes introduced by Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA, is the shift toward connecting users to specific resources rather than broadly connecting them to a network.
Consider two remote employees. One needs a customer relationship management system; the other needs an internal development environment. A traditional remote-access architecture may place both users on the corporate network after they authenticate, with additional controls determining what they can reach.
A Zero Trust approach can start from a narrower position. Each user receives access to the application or resource required for the job, subject to policies governing identity, device status and other contextual signals.
This follows the principle of least privilege: access should be sufficient for the task without being unnecessarily broad.
It also changes the consequences of a compromised account. If an attacker steals credentials with tightly restricted permissions, there may be fewer opportunities to move laterally within the organization.
That doesn’t make Zero Trust an automatic shield against breaches. Policies can be badly configured, authentication systems can fail, and attackers continually adapt. Zero Trust is an architectural approach, not a security product that can simply be installed and forgotten.
Why Identity Is Becoming the New Perimeter
The phrase “never trust, always verify” is often associated with Zero Trust, but the practical model is more nuanced than simply asking users for passwords.
Modern access systems can evaluate multiple signals. Who’s requesting access? Which device are they using? Is that device known and appropriately secured? Which resource is being requested? Does the request fit normal behavior? Should access continue if those conditions change?
For a broader explanation of the model and how identity and access fit together, this is what Zero Trust means in 2026.
This identity-centered approach is becoming more relevant as phishing becomes harder for ordinary users to judge. Generative AI can help attackers produce polished messages without the spelling errors and awkward phrasing that once made some phishing attempts easier to spot. Deepfake audio and other forms of impersonation add another layer of difficulty.
Organizations consequently cannot base security on the assumption that employees will identify every deceptive message before clicking.
Access controls need to account for the possibility that credentials will eventually be exposed.
VPN or Zero Trust Is the Wrong Choice
The most useful way to understand this transition isn’t as a contest in which Zero Trust replaces VPNs everywhere.
The technologies address overlapping but different needs.
A VPN can protect traffic on an untrusted network. It can also provide secure connectivity to infrastructure that remains difficult or impractical to expose through application-specific access systems. Zero Trust, meanwhile, can control who reaches particular resources and under which conditions.
Many organizations will therefore operate hybrid environments for some time. Legacy systems may continue to depend on VPN connectivity while newer cloud applications use identity-aware access controls. Security teams can gradually reduce broad network privileges rather than attempting to rebuild every access system at once.
For smaller organizations, that gradual approach may be especially important. Replacing infrastructure entails technical and operational costs, while poorly implemented Zero Trust can introduce complexity without delivering its intended security gains.
The goal isn’t to adopt the newest label. It’s to reduce unnecessary trust.
Secure Access Is Becoming a Continuous Decision
The lasting change is less about whether the VPN survives and more about what happens after a connection is established.
Older security models often placed enormous importance on the moment of entry. Authenticate successfully, enter the protected environment and continue working. Emerging approaches treat access as something that can be limited, reassessed and revoked as circumstances change.
That is a better match for computing environments in which people, devices and data rarely stay in one place.
VPNs will continue to have a role wherever encrypted connectivity is needed. But the secure tunnel is increasingly becoming one layer rather than the entire remote-access strategy.
The future of access security is likely to depend on combining encryption with identity, device awareness and tightly controlled permissions. In that model, getting through the door is no longer enough. The more important question is what someone should be able to do once they are through it.
