Zero Trust Security in 2026: Why US Companies Are Ditching VPNs for Good

“For three decades, the VPN was the unquestioned gatekeeper of corporate America. That era is over — and the numbers finally prove it.”

Walk into any enterprise IT meeting in 2026, and you will not hear debates about whether to move off VPNs. The debate now is about how fast. A shift that security professionals have been predicting for years has crossed into undeniable territory, driven by a string of high-profile breaches, federal mandates, and a workforce that no longer lives inside any single office building.

The core idea behind Zero Trust is simple enough to fit on a coffee mug — "never trust, always verify" — but the operational reality is more substantive. Instead of granting broad network access once a user authenticates (the VPN model), Zero Trust architecture continuously validates identity, device health, and context for every single resource request. No one gets a free pass just because they are already inside the perimeter.

The VPN problem, plainly stated

VPNs were designed for a world where employees sat in offices and occasionally dialed in from home. That world ended sometime around March 2020 and has not come back. Today, with 82% of organizations running hybrid or multi-cloud environments, the assumption of a "trusted inside" no longer maps to reality.

The security math has also gotten worse. VPN infrastructure is internet-facing by definition, which means threat actors can probe it continuously. Last year, more than half of organizations reported a breach that came in through a compromised VPN — up from the year before. CISA issued a critical advisory in early 2025 about a remote code execution vulnerability in widely deployed VPN products, warning that patches were not being applied fast enough. The window between disclosure and exploitation has shrunk to days, sometimes hours.

“If you are reachable on the public internet, you are reachable — full stop. VPNs are internet-connected devices, and that is increasingly the problem, not the solution.”

What Zero Trust actually changes

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) — the technical implementation of Zero Trust principles for remote access — works fundamentally differently. Rather than placing a user on the network and hoping they behave, ZTNA connects users directly to specific applications, with nothing else in scope. A contractor working on your billing system cannot see your HR database, even accidentally. Lateral movement, the technique attackers rely on after an initial foothold, becomes dramatically harder when there is no flat network to move through.

For US companies navigating compliance — HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and the growing pressure from NIST's Zero Trust Architecture framework (SP 800-207) — this granularity is not just nice to have. It is becoming the baseline regulators expect to see.

Gartner projected that by 2026, 70% of new remote access deployments would rely on ZTNA rather than traditional VPNs. Real-world adoption numbers suggest that forecast was conservative. Nearly one in three enterprises has already fully deployed ZTNA, with another 53% actively in the process of doing so.

The business case beyond security

Security alone rarely drives enterprise infrastructure decisions at the speed we are seeing here. The operational and financial arguments for Zero Trust have quietly become just as compelling.

Traditional VPNs force all traffic — even a user accessing a SaaS application — to route through a corporate data center before heading back out to the internet. Security professionals call this "hair pinning." It adds latency, consumes bandwidth, and scales badly as remote workforces grow. ZTNA solutions, by contrast, connect users directly to applications, which means faster performance and lower bandwidth costs at scale.

A Forrester Total Economic Impact study found that ZTNA deployments delivered substantial return on investment over three years when factoring in reduced breach costs, lower infrastructure overhead, and simplified vendor management. Organizations that have made the switch report improved security and compliance outcomes as their top advantage — cited by 76% of those who transitioned — followed closely by scalability gains and operational simplicity.

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Where American companies stand right now

The pace of adoption in the US is being shaped by several forces simultaneously. Federal agencies were directed to adopt Zero Trust architectures by executive order in 2021, which pushed vendors to mature their enterprise offerings faster. That vendor maturity has now filtered down to mid-market companies that would previously have found Zero Trust implementations too complex or too expensive.

The consolidation of security platforms under the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) model has helped too. Rather than deploying a standalone ZTNA product and hoping it integrates with everything else, security teams can now get Zero Trust access controls as part of a unified platform that also handles secure web gateways, cloud access brokering, and threat prevention — all in a single policy framework.

The companies that are moving fastest tend to share a few characteristics: they have distributed workforces, meaningful cloud footprints, and at least one incident in recent memory that started with a compromised VPN credential. The companies still holding back are largely wrestling with legacy systems, policy complexity, and the very real challenge of migrating decades of network access rules into a new architecture. That work is hard. But security teams are increasingly clear that postponing it only raises the cost of the eventual breach.

Zero Trust is no longer a future-state strategy for US enterprises. It is the floor — and the VPN is becoming a relic of a security model the threat landscape has long since outgrown.

Read further

1. Why 81% of organizations planto adopt zero trust by 2026
2. Zero Trust Is the Big Idea.2026 Is the Year It Got Small and Specific

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