VPNs and Secure Remote Access: What Small Businesses Need to Know in 2026

When your team works from home, from the road, or from a second location, they need a way to reach the systems and files that used to live safely inside the office. For most of the last two decades, the answer was simple: a VPN. It is still the default at countless small businesses, and for good reason, it works. But the way attackers operate has changed, and the old approach to secure remote access now carries risks that were not obvious when VPNs became standard. This guide explains how VPNs work, where they fall short today, what the newer zero trust approach does differently, and how a small business should think about the choice without overreacting in either direction.

The Remote Access Problem

The core challenge has not changed even as the tools have: people outside the office need to reach internal resources, and you need that connection to be private and safe. In the old model, a business kept its systems and data inside a protected network perimeter, and remote access meant giving someone a secure way through that perimeter to the inside. That worked well when nearly everything lived in one place. The trouble is that the world stopped looking like that, with applications and data now spread across cloud services and multiple locations, and the perimeter that VPNs were built to protect is no longer where all the value sits.

This shift is why secure remote access deserves a fresh look rather than an automatic continuation of what you have always done. The goal remains the same, but the threat environment and the way your systems are arranged have both changed enough that the best tool for the job is worth reconsidering. None of this means a VPN is suddenly useless, but it does mean the assumption that a VPN is automatically the right answer no longer holds without thinking it through.

How a VPN Works, and Why It Was the Standard

A VPN, or virtual private network, creates an encrypted tunnel between a remote user and your network, so that data traveling over the public internet stays private and the user can reach internal resources as if they were sitting in the office. For securing remote connectivity, this was a genuine advance, and it is why businesses adopted VPNs widely. The encryption protects the data in transit, and the tunnel gives remote staff access to the files, applications, and systems they need from wherever they are.

The defining characteristic of the traditional VPN model is also the root of its modern weakness: it grants access based on location. Once a user connects through the VPN, they are treated as being inside the trusted network, and that often means broad access to much of what is on it. The VPN authenticates the user at login and then largely trusts them, on the assumption that anyone who got through the tunnel belongs there. That assumption made sense when threats were different, but it is exactly the part that has aged poorly.

Where VPNs Fall Short Today

Two problems have turned the traditional VPN from a clear best practice into something that needs careful thought, and both deserve a plain explanation.

Broad Access and Lateral Movement

The first problem is that broad, network-wide access is dangerous in a breach. If a remote user's device is compromised, through malware or stolen credentials, the attacker inherits that broad access and can move through the network reaching far more than that one user actually needed. Security people call this lateral movement, and it is how a single compromised account turns into a network-wide incident. A model that drops users into the network and trusts them gives an attacker who gets in a great deal of room, which is precisely what you do not want.

VPN Appliances Are a Target

The second problem is that the VPN gateways businesses run have become favorite targets for attackers. These internet-facing devices are exposed by design, and serious vulnerabilities in them are discovered regularly, with attackers actively working to exploit them to gain a direct path into networks. Compounding this, many businesses are slow to patch these devices, leaving a known weakness open during the window attackers most want to use it. Keeping these systems current is essential, which is one reason ongoing monitoring and management of your infrastructure matters so much when you depend on a VPN.

The Zero Trust Alternative

The newer approach to remote access flips the core assumption of the VPN. Instead of trusting a user because they connected to the network, Zero Trust Network Access, usually shortened to ZTNA, follows the principle of never trust, always verify. It grants access to specific applications rather than the whole network, checks the user's identity and the health of their device on every request, and continuously re-evaluates rather than trusting a single login. The result is that a user reaches only the particular applications they are authorized for, and the rest of the network stays invisible to them.

This design directly addresses the weaknesses of the VPN model. Because access is limited to individual applications rather than the whole network, a compromised account cannot roam freely, which sharply limits lateral movement. Because verification is continuous and considers device health and context, a stolen credential alone is less useful. This approach is one expression of the broader zero trust architecture that has become the direction of modern security, applied specifically to the problem of remote access. A larger umbrella called secure access service edge, or SASE, bundles ZTNA with other protections, but the core idea for remote access is the zero trust model.

VPN and ZTNA, Side by Side

The differences are easier to see directly. The table below summarizes how the two approaches compare on the points that matter most for security:

The comparison makes the security advantage of the zero trust model clear, but it is not the whole story for a small business, where cost and practicality also weigh heavily. A genuine assessment, such as the kind included in managed cybersecurity, looks at how your business actually works before recommending one approach over the other, rather than treating the newer option as automatically right for everyone.

What This Means for a Small Business

It would be easy to read the above and conclude that every business should abandon VPNs immediately, but the honest picture is more measured. The zero trust approach is more secure, and the industry is clearly moving in that direction, with analysts expecting most new remote access deployments to favor it. For a small business, though, the practical question is not only which is more secure but whether the cost and effort of changing are justified for your size and situation, and that answer varies.

It Is Not All or Nothing

One reassuring point is that this is not a forced, overnight switch. Many businesses run both, using the zero trust model for their most sensitive or cloud-based applications while keeping a VPN for legacy systems or specific needs, then shifting more over time. A sensible path is often to start by protecting the highest-risk access with the newer approach and migrate gradually, rather than ripping everything out at once. Cloud-delivered zero trust services have also become far more accessible to smaller businesses than they once were, since they typically require no hardware to buy and maintain, which lowers a barrier that used to put this out of reach.

At a Minimum, Secure What You Have

If a move to zero trust is not in the cards right now, the worst outcome is leaving a VPN in place and ignoring its weaknesses. At a minimum, any remote access should be protected with strong authentication, so a stolen password alone cannot grant entry, and any VPN appliances should be kept promptly patched against the vulnerabilities attackers target. Adding multi-factor authentication to remote access is one of the highest-value steps available, since so many remote-access breaches trace back to credentials that worked with nothing else standing in the way. Securing what you have is the baseline; moving toward zero trust is the stronger long-term direction.

Signs It May Be Time to Move Beyond a VPN

If you are weighing whether to prioritize a change, a few signals suggest the traditional VPN model is no longer serving you well. If most of your important applications now live in the cloud rather than on your own network, the VPN is routing people to a perimeter that holds less and less of what they actually need. If you regularly grant access to outside contractors or vendors, the broad access a VPN provides is hard to contain and worth replacing with something more granular. If you face audit or compliance expectations that require detailed records of who accessed what, the limited visibility of many VPN setups becomes a real liability, since the newer model logs access at the application level in a way auditors find far easier to work with. And if your VPN appliance is aging or you struggle to patch it promptly, you are carrying exactly the kind of exposure attackers look for. Any one of these is reason to look seriously at a zero trust approach; several together make the case strong. And even if you decide the timing is not right yet, knowing exactly where you stand on these points turns the eventual move from a last-minute scramble into a planned change you control.

Making the Right Choice for Your Business

The decision about secure remote access comes down to balancing security, cost, and how your business actually operates. A business heavily reliant on cloud applications with a distributed team has a strong case for moving toward zero trust sooner; a smaller operation with simpler needs might reasonably keep a well-secured VPN for now while planning the eventual shift. What matters is that the choice is made deliberately, with the weaknesses of the old model understood rather than ignored, and with strong authentication and prompt patching in place regardless of which path you take.

For a business in the Los Angeles area weighing this decision, a provider offering managed IT services in Los Angeles can assess your specific setup and recommend an approach that fits rather than pushing a one-size answer.

For businesses across the wider region, a team offering IT support in Thousand Oaks can do the same, so your remote workforce stays both productive and protected wherever your people happen to be working.

If your team works remotely and you are not sure whether your current setup is secure or whether it is time to move beyond a VPN, GlobeVM can assess how your business works and recommend a secure remote access approach that fits your size, your systems, and your budget.