For most of my career, I’ve been helping organizations solve the same challenge, how do you give people remote access to critical systems without putting the business at risk?
Twenty years ago, VPNs felt like the good answer. They encrypted traffic, authenticated users, and made remote administration practical. For a long time, that was enough.
But I’ve watched the same pattern play out time and time again. A company starts with a handful of IT administrators using a VPN. Then contractors need access. Managed service providers come onboard. Cloud administrators, developers, and third-party vendors are added. Before long, the VPN isn’t just providing remote connectivity, it’s become the gateway to the organization’s most sensitive systems.
That’s not really a VPN problem. It’s a privileged access problem.
VPNs Were Built for Connectivity, Not Control
There’s nothing inherently wrong with VPN technology. It still provides encrypted communications and has legitimate use cases.
The problem is what happens after someone connects.
In many environments, a successful VPN login provides broad network access. If an attacker compromises those credentials—or the endpoint they’re connecting from—they often inherit the same level of trusted access as the legitimate user.
We’ve seen the consequences firsthand. The widespread exploitation of enterprise VPN gateways over the past few years, including the Ivanti Connect Secure attacks that impacted government agencies and private organizations, reinforced just how attractive remote access infrastructure has become to attackers. When your VPN is the front door to the business, it’s one of the first places they’ll try to get in.
Remote Access Is Now Privileged Access
The systems people manage remotely today aren’t just file servers. They’re Active Directory, Linux servers, cloud infrastructure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, databases, network devices, and virtualization platforms. Access to these systems should be treated differently than remote access to email or collaboration tools.
That’s why modern Privileged Access Management (PAM) has evolved beyond password vaults. Secure remote access, credential isolation, just-in-time access, session monitoring, and detailed auditing have become core capabilities for protecting privileged operations. They are no longer optional features.
The Hidden Cost of VPNs
Security isn’t the only reason organizations should rethink VPNs.
Over time, VPN environments become another critical piece of infrastructure that IT has to manage. Every new employee, contractor, vendor, and business partner requires accounts, policies, certificates, client software, firewall rules, and ongoing support. VPN gateways must be patched, monitored, and maintained because they’re constantly exposed to the internet.
For smaller IT teams, that’s a significant operational burden. And VPNs can also create friction for users, requiring client software and routing administrative traffic through centralized gateways that can become bottlenecks as organizations become more distributed.
Modern PAM platforms take a different approach. Rather than granting users network-level access through a VPN, they broker secure, authenticated connections directly to authorized systems. That simplifies the user experience while reducing network exposure and giving IT far greater visibility and control over privileged activity.
You Don’t Need a Massive PAM Project
One misconception I still hear is that improving remote access means committing to a large, expensive PAM project. That may have been true years ago, but it doesn’t have to be today.
Modern PAM solutions are designed to be deployed incrementally. Organizations can start by securing remote administrative access—without installing agents across their environment or disrupting existing workflows—and expand into broader privileged access controls as their security needs evolve.
For many organizations, the biggest improvement comes from changing how privileged access is delivered. Instead of giving users broad network connectivity through a VPN, provide secure, time-limited access only to the systems they’re authorized to manage. Protect privileged credentials behind the scenes. Require MFA. Record administrative sessions. Make every privileged connection accountable.
You don’t have to solve every privileged access challenge on day one. But replacing VPN-centric administrative access with a Zero Trust approach is often the highest-impact place to start.
Start with Your Biggest Risk
VPNs aren’t going away anytime soon, and they still have legitimate uses. But they were never designed to be the primary security boundary for privileged access.
As organizations continue moving to hybrid infrastructure, cloud platforms, and AI-driven operations, the question isn’t whether users can connect remotely. It’s whether that access is controlled, visible, and limited to exactly what’s needed.
12Port is an agentless PAM platform that lets organizations modernize remote privileged access without the complexity of legacy PAM deployments. You can secure remote administrative access first with Zero Trust controls, credential protection, and session management, then expand into broader Privileged Access Management as your security program evolves.
If you’re still relying on VPNs to protect privileged access, it may be time to rethink where your security boundary really belongs. Contact us today to book a meeting or watch our remote access video
See 12Port for yourself
Drop your work email and we will reach out.
No spam. One follow-up, that’s it.