Work doesn’t happen in one place anymore.
Employees move between home offices, corporate locations, airports, hotels, coffee shops, and customer sites, often in the same week.
As work became more distributed, the assumptions behind traditional access models no longer matched reality. For years, the VPN was the front door to the business. Employees connected to it first, then accessed the applications, files, and systems they needed.
Today, that workflow looks very different.
Oftentimes, employees can access much of what they need directly from the cloud without thinking about whether they are connected to the VPN.
They are not intentionally creating risk or ignoring security policies. They just no longer need the VPN to access many of the applications they use every day.
For users, it’s convenient. For IT, it makes maintaining visibility and consistent access policies much harder. When the VPN is no longer the primary path to business applications, it can no longer serve as the central access control point it was once expected to be.
That’s where many IT teams find themselves today.
It’s not that employees are skipping the VPN. It’s what that behavior reveals: work no longer depends on it. Therefore, IT needs a new way to maintain oversight and security across every access path.
Why People Work Outside Traditional Access Models
For employees, it’s rarely a conscious decision. They follow the path of least resistance, which makes sense when you consider how the workplace has evolved.
Many of the applications employees rely on every day live outside the corporate network. Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and countless other business tools are cloud services designed for direct access.
In these cases, the VPN feels unnecessary.
Sometimes the VPN slows performance. Sometimes it adds extra login steps. Sometimes it introduces additional authentication prompts that users see as another obstacle to getting their work done.
When employees discover they can access the applications they need without connecting to the VPN, they naturally choose the simpler option.
This is not a user problem. It is a sign that the access model no longer fits how people work. The goal is not to force users back into an old workflow. It’s to create a secure access model that works with modern workflows rather than against them.
Why This Creates a Challenge for IT
When users access applications through multiple paths, security controls can become fragmented, and visibility becomes harder to maintain.
Traditionally, the VPN served as a central point of control. User traffic flowed through a known path where security policies could be applied and monitored. However, as cloud adoption accelerated, that model began to break down.
Now user activity is distributed across SaaS applications, identity providers, endpoint security tools, cloud platforms, VPN logs, and security monitoring systems, resulting in fragmented visibility.
An IT team may know a user authenticated successfully through an identity platform.
A SaaS application may show that files were accessed.
An endpoint tool may indicate that the device is healthy.
The VPN may show no activity at all.
Each system contains part of the story, but few provide the complete picture. Which makes it harder to answer important questions:
- Who is accessing sensitive applications?
- From which devices?
- From what locations?
- Under what conditions?
- Are security policies being applied consistently?
- Is the user operating within an acceptable risk profile?
A VPN can only apply its protections to the traffic that flows through it.
When employees work outside that path, IT needs another way to see and control access.
Why Traditional Access Models Are Changing
VPNs were designed for an environment where applications lived inside a central data center. Remote employees needed a secure tunnel into the network because that was where business resources were located.
Over time, the architecture shifted toward a cloud first model, with applications distributed across SaaS platforms, cloud providers, and hybrid environments. Employees may now spend most of their day in applications that never touch the corporate network.
That change requires a different approach to secure access, one that ensures the right users can access the right applications under the right conditions.
From Network Trust to Context-Aware Access
Traditional remote access began with a simple question: Should this user be allowed to connect to the corporate network?
Once connected, the user could often reach a broader set of network resources than they actually needed.
Security controls have evolved, but many traditional remote access models still rely on a similar assumption. Broad network access can increase risk when users only need access to a few specific applications.
The modern workplace requires more context than a traditional VPN was designed to provide.
As a result, the questions security teams are now asking look very different:
- Who is the user?
- What device are they using?
- Is the device compliant?
- Where are they connecting from?
- What applications are they trying to access?
- Does the behavior appear risky?
- Should access be allowed right now?
Those questions require an access model built around identity, context, and the applications users need to access. That’s one of the reasons many are moving toward Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE. SASE brings networking and security capabilities together to help organizations make access decisions based on identity, device, application, and context.
Why Organizations Are Adopting SASE
SASE is designed for the modern workforce. Rather than relying on the VPN as the primary access path, SASE delivers security controls closer to the user, application, and data.
In practical terms, SASE helps secure access to private applications, SaaS platforms, and internet resources while applying policies based on identity, device posture, application type, location, and risk.
Many SASE platforms also include Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA, which limits access to specific applications instead of broad network segments. This approach supports Zero Trust principles by giving users access only to the applications and resources they need.
SASE adoption is increasing because of the need to:
- Improve visibility into user and application access
- Reduce reliance on broad VPN access to the network
- Support remote and hybrid work more effectively
- Secure SaaS and cloud environments consistently
- Create a more scalable remote access model
This gives IT greater awareness and control while allowing access decisions to reflect the user, device, application, and surrounding risk.
How SASE Improves the User Experience
With a traditional remote access model, the experience often depends on whether users remember to connect to the VPN, whether an application requires it, or whether IT has enforced it.
Some work happens through the VPN, while other work happens outside it. The result is an inconsistent experience.
Employees may encounter unnecessary obstacles while IT struggles to maintain consistent policy enforcement.
With SASE, security policies can be applied based on the user, device, application, and context rather than depending primarily on whether traffic passes through the corporate network. Access decisions can consider:
- User identity
- Device health and posture
- Location
- Application being accessed
- Risk signals and behavior
Users can access the applications they need with fewer unnecessary interruptions while security policies operate in the background. IT gains more visibility and control without requiring employees to change how they work.
SASE isn’t a newer VPN. It’s a fundamentally different access model built for a distributed workforce, and it can replace traditional VPN access in the right use cases.
How SASE Helps Supports IT
For IT, the benefit goes beyond security. SASE can also improve manageability.
IT teams support everything from remote users and hybrid environments to cloud applications, compliance requirements, and evolving threats. The challenge is doing so consistently.
With SASE, organizations can:
- Gain clearer insight into user and application activity
- Apply policies based on user, device, application, and context
- Reduce broad network-level access
- Support remote and hybrid workers more effectively
- Reduce VPN related support issues
- Improve policy consistency across environments
- Build a more scalable foundation for secure access
Most importantly, IT can make access decisions with greater confidence, resulting in stronger security and a more consistent, manageable remote access model.
Why a Managed Approach Matters
Implementing SASE is more than a technology project. It requires thoughtful planning.
Policies must be designed, identity systems integrated, applications evaluated, and access models aligned with business requirements.
Then comes deployment, monitoring, tuning, and ongoing optimization.
For IT teams that are already stretched thin, that is a significant undertaking. Understanding the need is not the problem. The challenge is finding the time and resources to build and manage it alone.
That’s where a managed approach can help.
TPx helps evaluate your current environment, identify remote access gaps, design appropriate access policies, deploy the solution, and provide ongoing support and optimization as applications, users, and business requirements change.
For many IT teams, another platform to manage is not a solution. They need a managed approach to secure access that evolves with the business.
Signs Your Secure Access Strategy Needs to Evolve
Not every organization needs to replace its VPN immediately.
However, many are already seeing signs that their remote access model is struggling to keep pace with their workforce.
You may be ready to evaluate SASE if:
- Employees frequently work without connecting to the VPN
- VPN usage is limited to a small number of legacy applications
- IT lacks visibility into who is accessing what
- Users complain about slow or inconsistent remote access
- VPN related support tickets continue to consume help desk resources
- Contractors need limited access to specific applications
- SaaS adoption has outgrown existing access controls
- IT wants stronger security without increasing complexity
Sound familiar? If so, it may be time to evaluate whether your current approach still fits your environment.
Rethinking Secure Access
SASE provides a modern approach to securing user and application access that better reflects how people work today. It works alongside existing firewalls and network security controls to help extend consistent security policies across users, devices, applications, and locations.
For IT teams balancing security, productivity, and a distributed workforce, that is a better foundation for the future.
The way people work has changed. Secure access needs to reflect that reality.
TPx can evaluate your applications, VPN usage, identity architecture, and remote access workflows to identify potential gaps and determine where SASE could improve security, visibility, and user experience.
