Can ZTNA replace your VPN? Compare 3 remote access approaches

Secure, seamless remote access is a business enabler — boosting remote user productivity and reducing the time spent by IT teams to onboard and maintain user-to-application connectivity with agility and resilience. And yet, remote access remains a challenge for many organizations.

Once upon a time, VPNs offered a simple way to connect a few remote users to corporate networks for brief periods of time. As workforces become more distributed, however — and organizations needed to keep remote users securely connected for longer periods of time — the flaws in this approach became evident, from sluggish performance and increased security risks to scalability concerns.

As remote access needs grow, organizations are increasingly shifting away from traditional VPN implementations and toward more secure and performant remote access solutions. Zero Trust network access, or ZTNA, creates secure boundaries around specific applications, private IPs, and hostnames, replacing default-allow VPN connections with default-deny policies that grant access based on identity and context