VPN-Less Privileged Access Management (PAM): The Smart Shift

For years, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been the go-to method for giving remote users access to critical systems. For Privileged Access Management (PAM), they act as gatekeepers, controlling how engineers, admins, and third-party vendors connect to sensitive infrastructure. 

But as organizations move toward cloud-native architectures and remote teams become the norm, VPN-based access is clearly starting to show its age.

Still, VPNs persist. In one study, 80% of users said they use a VPN for increased security, while just 6% cited protecting their employer’s data, and 16% use a VPN because it’s required by their employer.

The truth is, traditional VPNs introduce friction, expand the attack surface, and often grant far more access than needed. They rely on a binary trust model; once you’re in, you’re trusted. That directly conflicts with modern security frameworks like Zero Trust, which prioritize identity, context, and continuous verification over static perimeter control.

The Limitations of Traditional VPNs in a Modern IT Landscape

VPNs were designed for a time where infrastructure was centralized, users were on-prem, and the “network perimeter” still made sense. Today, this is no longer the case. 

Modern IT environments are fluid, built on cloud, spread across hybrid environments, and accessed by people from everywhere, on all kinds of devices. In that context, the traditional VPN model starts to crack. Here’s where it falls short:

1. Implicit Trust

VPNs operate on a flawed assumption: once you’re on the network, you’re trusted. That’s a dangerous model in today’s world, where credentials, insider threats, and lateral movement are common tactics in real attacks. 

Once a user connects, they often have visibility into far more of the network than they should. That’s not just inefficient; it’s risky.

2. Lack of Granular Access Control

VPNs don’t care who you are or why you are connecting. They care that you have access. This means access policies are usually based on IP ranges or group memberships–not identity, role, or context. You can’t easily enforce rules like, “this user can only access this one production server, and only for 30 minutes.” In privileged access scenarios, that lack of precision is a critical liability.

3. Poor Fit for Cloud and Hybrid Environments

VPNs were made for static infrastructure, but today’s environments are dynamic, cloud-native, containerized, API-driven, and constantly changing. Routing users through a VPN just to access cloud services adds unnecessary latency and complexity.

In hybrid setups, VPNs often require clunky network bridges or duplicated routing logic. It’s fragile, and it doesn’t scale.

4. Painful User Experience

VPNs introduce delays, drop connections, and often require extra steps or installed software. For distributed teams or third-party vendors, this creates friction that slows work down and leads to workarounds like shadow IT(the unauthorized and unsanctioned use of software). Security should enable access, not block it.

5. Visibility and Auditing Gaps

Traditional VPNs don’t provide detailed insights into what users do once they connect. Did they access a database? Run commands? Pull sensitive files? Without a separate logging or PAM layer, that visibility is lost, making incident response slower and compliance audits more difficult.

Understanding VPN-less Access

VPN-less access is a modern security approach that grants users access to specific systems based on identity, context, and policy, without placing them on the network. The core principles of VPN-less access include Zero Trust, least privilege, just-in-time access, context-aware authorization, auditability and visibility, and no network exposure.

The idea of “VPN-less access” may sound counterintuitive at first. If not a VPN, then what? How do users securely access internal systems, especially ones that are sensitive, without tunnelling into a private network?

The answer lies in a shift from network-based trust to identity-based access. VPN-less architectures don’t try to secure everything by putting users on the network. Instead, they focus on securing the access itself, based on who the user is, what they need to do, and the context of their request.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

Identity is the New Perimeter

Access is no longer granted because you are “inside the network”. It is granted because you’re authenticated, verified, and authorized to do a specific task. This typically involves:

• Single Sing-On (SSO) tied to your corporate identity provider
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to verify the user
• Role-or policy-based permissions to limit access to exactly what’s needed

Access is Scoped, Not Open-Ended

In a VPN-less model, access is scoped to specific resources, whether that’s a server, a database, a Kubernetes cluster, or an internal web application. There is no flat network to explore. If you haven’t been granted access to a system, you can’t even see that it exists. This is a huge win for reducing lateral movement and enforcing least privilege.

Sessions are Observable and Auditable

Unlike traditional VPNs, VPN-less access platforms often include session recording, logging, and real-time monitoring by default. Every privileged session can be tracked–who connected, what commands they ran, what data they accessed. That makes it far easier to meet compliance requirements and investigate incidents.

No Need for Network-Level Tunnels

Instead of routing users into the network, users connect to target systems via proxies, identity-aware gateways, or browser-based clients. That means no VPN clients, no split tunneling headaches, and no punching holes in firewalls. USers get just enough access to do their job, nothing more.

VPN-less Solutions for Privileged Access Management (PAM)

VPN-less PAM is a collection of modern security patterns designed to enable secure, precise, and auditable access without putting users on a private network. These solutions move away from perimeter-based models and focus on who is accessing what, when, why.

Here are the core solution patterns that define VPN-less PAM:

The Bottom Line

Traditional VPNs weren’t built for the complexity of modern infrastructure or the precision that privileged access demands. As security teams face growing pressure to reduce risk, increase visibility, and support distributed work, the limitations of VPN-based models are hard to ignore.

Privileged Access Management should be secure, auditable, and seamless. VPNs no longer provide that. VPN-less PAM solutions do.