The pandemic has accelerated the development of better ways to serve and secure remote workers, which make it a good time to re-examine VPNs. Recently VPNs have received technical boosts with the addition of protocol options that improve functionality far ahead of where they were when first invented. At the same time, new security architectures zero trust network access (ZTNA), secure access service edge (SASE), and security service edge (SSE) are making inroads into what had been the domain of remote-access VPNs.

In my latest post for Network World, I talk about ways that VPNs can complete ZTNA.