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Topic starter
08/06/2026 4:51 pm
TL;DR: VPNs still leave modern teams with all-or-nothing network access, weak auditability, and poor least-privilege enforcement across cloud and legacy systems, according to StrongDM’s analysis. The operational problem is not remote access itself but the identity governance model underneath it, which must cover humans, service accounts, and privileged workflows together.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by StrongDM: 3 Best Enterprise VPN Alternatives for Business in 2026
By the numbers:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams replace VPN access with identity-based controls?
A: Start by identifying which resources need privileged access and then bind access to the identity, the session, and the resource itself.
Q: Why do VPNs create governance problems in hybrid infrastructure?
A: VPNs were designed to extend network trust, not to enforce modern privilege boundaries.
Q: What breaks when privileged access is controlled only at the network layer?
A: You lose fine-grained policy enforcement, session-specific auditing, and the ability to distinguish one task from another inside the same tunnel.
Practitioner guidance
- Map privileged access to resources, not networks. Inventory which databases, servers, clusters, and admin consoles are still reachable through broad VPN membership and redesign those paths so policy is applied per resource and per session.
- Require session-level audit evidence. Make command capture, query logging, and administrative action logs mandatory for privileged workflows so incident response can reconstruct activity without relying on scattered system logs.
- Separate human and non-human access paths. Document where contractors, vendors, service accounts, and automation use the same remote-access pattern, then split those paths so lifecycle and approval rules match the identity type.
What's in the full article
StrongDM's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How the product maps access to databases, servers, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud drivers in one control layer
- Customer examples showing how audit trails capture user authentication, SSH, query, administrator, and RDP activity
- Implementation details on delegating authentication to an identity provider while keeping credentials off endpoints
- Workflow examples for onboarding and offboarding from a single provisioning point
👉 Read StrongDM's analysis of VPN alternatives for modern business access →
VPN alternatives for business access: what IAM teams need to fix?
Explore further
08/06/2026 6:44 pm
VPN alternatives are really identity governance controls for hybrid infrastructure. The article shows that once teams operate across legacy systems, cloud services, and third parties, the network boundary stops being a meaningful security boundary. The governance question becomes whether access can be expressed, logged, and revoked at the identity layer. Practitioners should treat remote access redesign as an IAM and PAM decision, not a network refresh.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations, which shows how often identity control still depends on unmanaged credential placement.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when third-party or service access is still routed through a VPN?
A: The accountable team is the one that owns lifecycle governance for the access path, not just the network. If vendors or service accounts can keep using broad access after their task ends, the organisation has an offboarding failure, not simply an access-tool problem. Auditors will expect revocation discipline and traceable ownership.
👉 Read our full editorial: VPN alternatives expose the limits of network-based access control
