Why VPNs Break Zero Trust and What Replaces Them

Every VPN deployment starts with the same architectural decision: place a device on the public internet, give it an open inbound port, and configure it to extend a private network to whoever successfully authenticates. 

That decision made sense in 1996, when the goal was to stretch the corporate perimeter across untrusted infrastructure. But it’s the exact opposite of what Zero Trust requires, and no amount of MFA, patching, or posture checking bolted onto a VPN changes its underlying shape. 

Why Can’t a VPN Support Zero Trust Architecture?

Strip away the vendor branding and every VPN architecture rests on two commitments:

• It listens. A VPN concentrator must accept inbound connections from the internet, which means it advertises an open port to every scanner, botnet, and exploit kit on the planet. Attackers do not need to be authorized to reach it; they only need to reach it. When a vulnerability appears in that appliance (and we’ve seen a steady stream of them across nearly every major vendor the past few years), the race between the attacker’s exploit and your maintenance window begins.
• It grants access to networks, not services. When a user or device authenticates to a VPN, the reward is a routable presence on the private network. The tunnel terminates, and the client can now send packets to subnets, not to a single application. Firewall rules and network segmentation can narrow that access, but the default posture is broad, and the operational reality in most environments is that VPN users can reach far more than they need. One stolen credential or one compromised laptop becomes a foothold with room to move laterally.

Zero Trust, properly understood, forbids both promises. It requires that no connection exist before authentication and authorization, and that access, once granted, extends to a specific service rather than a network. 

How Much Has VPN and Edge-Device Exploitation Increased in 2026?

For years, this argument was theoretical. Today, it’s not. In the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, vulnerability exploitation surpassed stolen credentials as the number one breach entry point for the first time in the report’s 19-year history. The category driving that shift is edge devices and VPNs, which accounted for 22% of exploitation-driven breaches, up from 3% the prior year.

The instinctive response is to patch faster, but the same dataset shows why that race is unwinnable. Organizations now face 50% more CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to remediate than the year before, and median remediation time grew from 32 days to 43 days. Meanwhile, exploit windows for newly disclosed vulnerabilities are now measured in days or hours. 

What Replaces VPN Access in a Zero Trust Model?

The durable answer is architectural: eliminate the inbound port, and eliminate network-level access. Both are achievable today, and together they remove the two properties that make VPNs the breach statistics’ favorite category.

The ideal replacement must have no exposed listener, be identity checked before any packet moves, and have access scoped to one service instead of a whole network. It may seem like a tall order, but NetFoundry does just that. 

• Dark by default. With NetFoundry’s secure workload connectivity, applications and services present no open inbound ports to any network, the internet, or the LAN. Endpoints make outbound-only connections to the NetFoundry fabric, so there is nothing for a scanner to find and nothing for an exploit to land on. An attacker cannot attack what they cannot address. This single change removes the entire class of edge-appliance exploitation that now leads the DBIR’s initial access data.
• Identity before connectivity. Every connection begins with a strongly authenticated identity, user, device, or workload, verified with certificate-based mutual TLS before a single application packet flows. There is no “connect first, authenticate second” window, because unauthenticated parties never obtain a network path in the first place.
• Services, not subnets. Authorization grants access to a named service and nothing else. A contractor authorized to reach one internal application can reach that application, full stop, with no routable presence on the network, no visibility into adjacent systems, and no lateral movement to attempt. The blast radius of a compromised credential shrinks from “the network” to “one service,” and revoking access is a policy change that takes effect instantly.
• No appliances to race-patch. Because the model is delivered as software, endpoints, SDKs, and a managed fabric, there is no internet-facing concentrator whose CVE list you monitor with dread. The perimeter appliance exits the architecture, and its vulnerability class exits with it.

Organizations that have already made this move aren’t hypothetical: LVT eliminated VPN backhaul across its global surveillance camera fleet by replacing VPNs and private APNs with an identity-based overlay, cutting egress costs in the process.

How to Replace Your VPN with Zero Trust Architecture

VPNs fail at Zero Trust because they were never designed for it. Extending a network to authenticated parties through an internet-facing listener was the assignment in 1996; it is the vulnerability in 2026, and the industry’s own breach data now says so in plain numbers. 

The organizations getting ahead of that data are not buying a better VPN. They are removing the inbound port, replacing network-level access with service-level access, and making their applications unreachable to everyone except the identities explicitly authorized to use them.

That is what NetFoundry’s Identity-First Reachability™ delivers, and moving your first application off the VPN takes hours, not quarters.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Zero Trust, and how is it different from a VPN?

Zero Trust is a security model where no user, device, or connection is trusted by default, even inside the network perimeter. Every access request must be authenticated and authorized before any connection is granted. A VPN does the opposite: it authenticates once, then grants broad network-level access for the session. At NetFoundry, we treat this as the core architectural conflict; Zero Trust requires access scoped to a single service, and a VPN by design cannot deliver that.

Can an existing VPN be configured to meet Zero Trust standards?

Not fully. Adding MFA, posture checks, or tighter firewall rules to a VPN reduces risk but doesn’t change its two structural properties: it still requires an open inbound listener, and it still grants network-level access once a session authenticates. We consider these unfixable at the architecture level, not the configuration level, which is why closing the gap means replacing the VPN rather than hardening it.

Does replacing a VPN with a Zero Trust architecture require ripping out existing infrastructure?

No. NetFoundry deploys as software, endpoints and SDKs that sit alongside existing infrastructure rather than replacing it wholesale. Most organizations move one application at a time, starting with the highest-risk or most exposed VPN use case, which is why the first migration typically takes hours rather than a multi-quarter project.

What happens to lateral movement risk when a VPN is replaced?

It drops sharply. A VPN grants a routable presence on the network, so a compromised credential can be used to probe adjacent systems. Under an identity-first model, authorization is scoped to one named service, so a compromised credential reaches only that service, not the network it sits on.