In 2026, staying on VPN is no longer a neutral choice; it’s an explicit decision to keep using the same access path attackers are actively optimizing against. A recent analysis of the top cyber risks in 2026 found that more than half of organizations experienced at least one VPN‑related cyberattack in the past year, and the majority of security leaders now worry their VPN could directly lead to a breach. At the same time, public vulnerability data shows record-high CVE volumes, with more than 21,500 vulnerabilities already cataloged by mid-2025 and a significant share tied to edge and VPN appliances, many rated high or critical and enabling remote code execution or authentication bypass.
Meanwhile, the policy environment has shifted. In January 2026, the NSA released its first Zero Trust Implementation Guidelines, along with a primer for defenders, moving Zero Trust from theory into concrete activities like “assume breach,” continuous verification, and granular, identity‑driven access controls, and organizations across the public and private sectors are already being briefed on these expectations. Shortly after, CISA directed federal agencies to inventory and remove end‑of‑support edge devices, including aging VPN gateways, calling them one of the most persistent intrusion paths into government networks.
If your remote access strategy in 2026 still depends on putting users “on the network” via VPN, you’re now out of alignment with both attacker behavior and the direction of federal guidance.
The Challenge: VPNs at the Center of 2025–2026 Breach Patterns
VPNs still sit at the center of how employees, contractors, and partners reach internal resources. But the way they work—exposing internet‑facing portals, flattening access once connected, and relying on static credentials—aligns almost perfectly with how attackers operate today. Analyses of VPN security concerns and 2026 risk trends show that VPN appliances and gateways remain high‑value targets.
Recent campaigns have hammered major platforms. A December 2025 investigation documented a large‑scale credential‑spraying campaign against Cisco and Palo Alto VPN gateways, chaining authentication‑bypass and command‑injection vulnerabilities with persistence techniques that survive patching. Other reports tie a significant share of ransomware intrusions to hijacked VPN credentials and misconfigured remote access, reinforcing that VPN portals are still one of the easiest ways to get a foothold.
At the same time, organizations admit they struggle to keep up. Public CVE data and vendor advisories show that VPN and edge devices continue to receive a steady stream of high- and critical-severity vulnerabilities, many of which are exploited in the wild before organizations can patch them, especially when those devices sit at the network perimeter and require careful change windows. In practice, many security teams still lack deep visibility into what moves over their VPN tunnels and often days or longer to fully deploy patches to remote access gateways—a dangerous delay when exploitation windows are shrinking.
Regulators and standards bodies are responding. The NSA’s Zero Trust guidance emphasizes that network connectivity can no longer be used as a proxy for trust. Implementation guides and operational playbooks, like the NSA’s, reinforce the shift toward identity, device posture and context‑aware access decisions.
In 2026, VPNs are not just “legacy tech.” They now sit at the crossroads of industrialized vulnerability exploitation, credential theft at scale, and a regulatory push to assume breach and drastically reduce lateral movement.
How ZTNA Addresses the 2026 VPN Problem
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) isn’t a new solution, but it directly targets the failure modes the 2025–2026 data and guidance are calling out. Instead of granting broad network‑level access, ZTNA enforces fine‑grained, identity‑centric access to specific applications and services.
Modern definitions of ZTNA and Zero Trust security share three core principles that map cleanly to current expectations:
- Authenticate and authorize users and devices up front, using identity, device posture, and context, before any access is granted.
- Limit each connection to a “segment of one” — just the specific applications or services that identity is entitled to use.
- Continuously re‑evaluate trust throughout the session, adjusting access as context or risk changes.
By keeping applications invisible to unauthenticated users and shrinking what any one identity can reach, ZTNA operationalizes the “assume breach” and continuous verification guidance coming from NSA and other authorities, rather than relying on a network perimeter that attackers already know how to bypass.
How AppGate ZTNA Helps Organizations Act on 2026 Guidance
Once you accept that the VPN status quo is out of step with both threat data and federal expectations, the next challenge is execution.
AppGate ZTNA is designed around the same principles highlighted in NSA’s 2026 guidance. AppGate’s ZTNA solution enforces those concepts by integrating with your existing identity providers and MFA, so access decisions are based on who the user is and the posture of their device, not just where they connect from.
Crucially, AppGate ZTNA grants application‑level entitlements instead of network‑level reach, creating direct, encrypted, one‑to‑one connections between authenticated users and authorized services. Any protected resources with an AppGate Gateway in front of it remain completely cloaked behind a mechanism called single packet authorization that turns “assume breach” into a smaller blast radius instead of just more alerts.
AppGate’s direct‑routed ZTNA architecture also avoids introducing new cloud chokepoints — a concern for federal agencies and critical‑infrastructure operators that need tight control over how traffic flows. This approach underpins our work extending Zero Trust into industrial and OT environments.
AppGate ZTNA gives organizations a way to translate 2026 Zero Trust guidance into day‑to‑day access controls, especially for environments where legacy VPNs and flat networks are still common.
VPN Is Now a Risk Decision, Not Business as Usual
Two years ago, moving from VPN to ZTNA could be framed as a best‑practice upgrade. In 2026, it looks more like an overdue risk decision. Established VPN risks and 2026 threat trends all point in the same direction: VPNs remain a preferred initial access path, and unpatched or unsupported edge devices are a systemic liability.
At the same time, the NSA’s Zero Trust Implementation Guidelines and operational playbooks make it clear that implicit network trust is no longer acceptable.
ZTNA is how organizations reconcile those realities. And AppGate ZTNA offers a way to act on them without disrupting how your users work, replacing “tunnel first” with “trust first” at the pace your environment can handle.
Learn more about how AppGate ZTNA supports VPN replacement and secure remote access.