Do You Still Need a VPN in 2026, or Is Zero Trust Better?

Most small businesses still need their VPN in 2026, but Zero Trust closes gaps a VPN was never built to cover, and the right call for most companies is layering the two, not picking one.

That question has shown up in more IT reviews this year than it did two years ago, mostly because attackers changed where they aim. The device sitting at the network edge, the exact box a VPN runs on, has become one of the preferred ways in. Not by accident.

Not everywhere. Not for every business. Just enough that it’s worth understanding the actual difference instead of picking a side because a vendor’s marketing page told you to.

This question is one of the more common ones in VJNetworks’ cybersecurity reviews lately, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a pitch for either side. Framework, not verdict.

The Deal With a VPN: One Login, Broad Access

A traditional VPN works on a single moment of trust. You authenticate once, usually with a username and password and maybe a second factor, and the VPN places your device “inside” the network. From that point on, you can typically reach a wide range of internal resources without proving who you are again. File shares. Internal applications. Sometimes the whole subnet.

That’s the design, not a flaw someone missed. VPNs were built in an era when “inside the office network” and “trustworthy” were treated as roughly the same thing. Convenient once. Risky now.

NIST Special Publication 800-207, the federal standard for Zero Trust Architecture, gets right at that structural difference. Authentication and authorization are supposed to be “discrete functions performed before a session to an enterprise resource is established,” evaluated per resource, not assumed once and carried forward. A VPN, by design, does the opposite of that.

What “Zero Trust” Actually Means, Not the Marketing Version

Here’s a fact that surprises most people who’ve heard the phrase a hundred times: “never trust, always verify” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in NIST’s own text. It’s industry shorthand, Forrester’s phrase originally, not the government standard’s language.

What NIST actually says is closer to this. Zero trust “assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their physical or network location… or based on asset ownership.” Access gets granted “on a per-session basis,” and it’s “determined by dynamic policy,” meaning the system keeps checking, not just at login.

One more distinction worth having straight before a vendor sells you something. ZTNA, Zero Trust Network Access, is a product category. Gartner defines it as a tool that creates an identity-based access boundary around specific applications, hiding them from discovery entirely. NIST’s Zero Trust Architecture is the bigger idea, the policy and governance blueprint that a ZTNA product is just one piece of. A single tool getting branded “zero trust” doesn’t mean you have the architecture. You bought a product.

Why This Question Got Louder in 2026

Two named incidents explain most of the urgency. In January 2025, Ivanti disclosed CVE-2025-0282, a stack-based buffer overflow in its Connect Secure VPN appliance, CVSS score 9.0, exploitable without authentication. CISA’s alert confirmed active exploitation dating back to mid-December 2024. No patch existed yet.

Then in January 2026, CISA flagged CVE-2026-24858, a FortiCloud SSO authentication bypass, CVSS 9.4, affecting FortiOS and other Fortinet gateway appliances widely deployed as VPN endpoints. Worth being precise here. That bypass hits the admin and SSO login path on the appliance, not the SSL-VPN client connection specifically. Still a way in.

Neither of those was random chance. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 31 percent of all breaches now start with vulnerability exploitation, the first time in the report’s 19-year history that exploiting a vulnerability outranked stolen credentials as the top way in. Edge appliances, the boxes running your VPN, sit right in that category.

None of that means VPNs are broken as a concept. It means a compromised VPN appliance or a stolen VPN credential tends to open a wide door, not a narrow one, and that’s the actual architectural argument for Zero Trust. Not hype. Blast radius.

What This Actually Costs a Small Company

The pricing is not the obstacle people assume it is. Under $10 a seat, most months. Cloudflare’s Zero Trust plan is free for teams under 50 users, full ZTNA and DNS filtering included, capped at three locations. Twingate has a free tier for up to five users, then a paid tier around $5 per user monthly. Microsoft Entra Private Access runs about $3 per user standalone, or it’s bundled into a broader license a lot of small businesses already hold pieces of.

Here’s the catch nobody mentions upfront. NIST’s own flagship implementation guide, SP 1800-35, finalized in June 2025 with nineteen example builds across twenty-four vendors, is written and demonstrated for enterprise environments. There’s no small-business on-ramp in the reference architecture itself. The tools are cheap. The canonical “here’s exactly how to do it” guide is not scaled down for a twenty-person company, so somebody still has to translate it.

That somebody doesn’t need to build the whole architecture at once.

• CISA’s own Zero Trust Maturity Model lays out four maturity stages, and the second one, “Initial,” is reachable by a small business with no dedicated security team. MFA everywhere, a real inventory of devices and users, and logging someone actually looks at. Not the finished version, just the honest starting point.
• Vendors themselves sell the incremental version, not a rip-and-replace pitch. Twingate’s own positioning says customers can “run Twingate side-by-side with your VPN and decommission the VPN whenever you’re ready,” which is a more honest pitch than most of this category offers.
• The practical pattern most companies land on is straightforward. Keep the VPN for whatever legacy on-prem system doesn’t support modern authentication, and put newer cloud access behind Zero Trust from day one.
• Nobody has to decide this in a single meeting. Sequencing is the whole point.

When It’s Fine to Keep the VPN

There’s a specific, recurring reason small businesses keep VPN access around even after moving newer systems to Zero Trust. A line-of-business application running on an old on-prem server, something built a decade ago with no modern authentication hooks, simply doesn’t support the identity-aware access model Zero Trust needs. Ripping out the VPN in that case doesn’t modernize security. It just breaks the app. Nothing gained.

Limited IT capacity is the other honest reason. A company with one overworked admin and a simple setup, remote staff reaching one on-prem network, gets more real security from patching that VPN appliance aggressively and enforcing strong MFA on it than from a half-finished Zero Trust rollout nobody has time to manage properly. A half-built anything is worse than a well-run something. Pick one. Finish it.

A Framework for Deciding, Not a Verdict

Four questions get most small businesses to a real answer faster than any vendor comparison chart will. Start there.

Do you have a legacy on-prem application without modern authentication support? If yes, that system probably keeps its VPN path regardless of what else changes.

Is someone actually patching your VPN appliance on a real schedule? The Ivanti and Fortinet cases above weren’t obscure edge cases. They were widely deployed appliances that stayed unpatched past the point of active exploitation. If patch discipline is inconsistent, that risk sits on the VPN specifically, not on the concept of remote access broadly.

What happens today if one remote employee’s credential gets phished? VJNetworks covered how insurers actually verify MFA enforcement account by account, and the same logic applies here. A stolen credential against a flat VPN network and a stolen credential against a scoped Zero Trust policy are not the same incident, even when the phishing email looks identical.

Can you afford $3 to $7 per user monthly and the setup time to configure it right? Simple math, really. If the budget and the bandwidth both exist, there’s very little reason to wait. If either one doesn’t, patch the VPN hard. Revisit this in six months instead of doing it badly now.

Before You Pick a Side

The honest version of this decision rarely lands on a clean winner. Most small businesses end up running both for a while, patching the VPN properly while adding Zero Trust behind the newer systems, and that’s not indecision. It’s the correct order of operations. VJNetworks builds this alongside managed IT services for companies across the Tri-State area who’d rather get a straight answer than a sales pitch for one side of it.