If you’re still shuffling VPN connection profiles like a deck of cards every Monday morning, you might want to sit down—because everything you thought you knew about “secure remote access” is in for a major rethink.
Let’s face it: the humble VPN has been the backbone of remote access security for decades, its legacy status almost guaranteed by the stubborn familiarity of usernames and passwords. Ask any IT pro managing a mature infrastructure, and you’ll likely hear a nostalgic defense of VPNs—still holding the fort for businesses wedded to classic Active Directory setups and loyal, domain-joined endpoints.
But under the glare of modern threats, our beloved VPN is showing signs of senility. According to Microsoft security expert Richard Hicks—the Obi-Wan Kenobi of secure remote access—the greatest risk isn’t a zero-day exploit or some Star Wars-esque state actor. No, it’s the “lack of strong authentication.” Most organizations are still stuck in the username-and-password rut, a setup so vulnerable even an amateur phishing campaign can break it (no offense, Kevin from Accounts).
Phishing-resistant credentials, like hardware-backed digital certificates, are now the minimum ante. The industry’s push toward Entra Conditional Access is less about keeping up with the Joneses and more about not getting entirely wiped out in a breach.
And let’s not forget: the drawbridge analogy for VPNs keeps getting grimmer. Once you’re in, you’re in—lateral movement for attackers has never been easier. As Hicks dryly notes, it’s time to “reduce the attack surface.” Translation? Shrink your kingdom and post some guards with real training.
Here’s the kind of granular control you get: administrators specify, in excruciating detail, what network resources are exposed, and to whom. Gone, Hicks emphasizes, is the “all or nothing” access paradigm. Administrators craft access policies tighter than a company holiday party’s drink tickets. Need that internal HR app? Sure, if you pass Conditional Access checks and submit to multifactor authentication (MFA). Want to poke around in payroll? You’ll need something stronger than just your dog’s name as a password.
Hicks praises the seamless integration between Entra Private Access and Conditional Access. Adaptive policies? Check. Enforced credential standards? Double-check. The result is a continuously tuned access model, aligned to actual risk, not just wishful thinking.
Of course, the zero-trust approach comes with its own learning curve. Many organizations are used to VPNs behaving like omnipresent, benevolent network wizards—enabling access to all, with relatively little thought given to specifics. If only Gandalf had been as rigorous as Conditional Access policies, the history of Middle Earth (and your network logs) might look very different.
The recommended migration playbook champions a smooth glide path. First up: activate Quick Access, an Entra Private Access feature that gently mimics your legacy VPN. It grants broad access—think of it as training wheels for the anxious. Meanwhile, Application Discovery takes notes in the background, mapping out actual application usage patterns. Only then, once IT can see what’s actually needed (spoiler alert: it’s rarely everything), does the shift to per-app and per-user policies begin.
This incremental approach is key. There's no one-click “Zero Trust Now” button, as much as Microsoft marketing might wish. Slow and steady wins the race—and spares IT from endless angry tickets about broken OneNote syncs.
The take-home for IT leaders? Embrace gradualism. Use the tools Entra provides to stage your security transformation, and remember: a phased approach is less likely to set Slack channels ablaze with all-caps “VPN DOWN?” cries at 2am.
The secret sauce is the Entra Global Secure Access (GSA) client, which attaches location signals to endpoints and rolls them up into Conditional Access. Now, access decisions can drill down beyond the "Are you who you say you are?" level, asking "Are you somewhere you’re supposed to be?" It’s the difference between giving your kid the house keys and asking them to FaceTime you from the front door before you disarm the alarm system.
Organizations can now identify “trusted and compliant” network locations—and only then allow access. If an endpoint is wandering through a sketchy cyber-neighborhood or, worse, connected to a malware-filled coffee shop Wi-Fi, access is denied, no matter how good the credentials look on paper.
This approach finally delivers on Zero Trust’s central promise: never trust, always verify, and never hand over the keys to the castle without a good reason (and proof of address).
Hicks’ enthusiasm for Zero Trust and cloud-first isn’t the starry-eyed optimism of a vendor pitchman. It’s the relief of someone who’s spent too many weekends babysitting ailing VPN concentrators in cold server rooms while birthday parties passed him by. With Entra, there’s no infrastructure weight—just service, scale, and security signals managed from the comfort of anywhere that isn’t a data center.
And let’s be blunt: zero-trust means more than checking a “cloud-first” box. It means laundry-listing your applications, organizing your user groups, and actually following through with MFA enforcement even when pushback is loud and persistent. You’ll need clear policies and a real understanding of how your app ecosystem is structured—which, if you’re like most organizations, is somewhere between “sophisticated” and “ancient collection of mystery .exes hosted under someone’s desk.”
The upside? Attackers will find your new environment far less welcoming. Lateral movement becomes significantly tougher; “phish-and-go” credential attacks are stopped at the gate. Compliance teams sleep better. Your IT help desk will—eventually—field fewer “I got locked out of everything” calls for suspicious activity.
Still, transitions always unsettle: users locked out for failing conditional checks, admins grappling with new dashboard interfaces, and the unavoidable learning curve that comes with any paradigm shift. Patience and phased rollouts are your armor.
Zero trust done badly can wreck morale faster than a broken coffee machine. If you botch your app discovery phase, you risk severing legitimate access, invoking rage and downtime in equal measure. Overzealous conditional policies can paint you into a corner, while coarse settings—meant to “just turn it on!”—don’t actually improve your security as much as you’d hope.
And then there’s the mixed blessing of cloud dependency. Outages on Microsoft’s end will impact your day-to-day far more than the average VPN hiccup. SLA math goes both ways. Entra and Azure do offer reliably high availability, but they’re not immune to global service interruptions—the rare, but devastating “cloudpocalypse” we all dread but secretly love to meme about.
On the positive side, Entra Private Access puts unprecedented visibility and control in your hands. No more smoke-and-mirrors guessing about who accessed what, from where, and why—this level of auditing is the analytics candy IT security teams crave. Plus, as regulations pile up, it’s much easier to prove you’ve implemented “strong, adaptive access controls” if you’re running Entra rather than shoehorning logs from three generations of VPN products into your audit reports.
Yet legacy VPNs will not go gently into that good night. There are still corners of the enterprise world clinging to VPNs out of habit, inertia, and a certain nostalgic comfort. It’s a bit like still faxing contracts “just to be sure.” Give it five more years, and VPN-fueled nostalgia may be the only thing keeping some server rooms warm.
Entra Private Access—and other cloud-native ZTNA contenders—will increasingly become the backbone for remote access, especially as hybrid work cements itself as the status quo. Admins who embrace this change will weather fewer breaches, field friendlier compliance audits, and, hopefully, enjoy fewer late-night alerts from jittery VPN concentrators.
Still, vigilance is crucial: ZTNA isn’t idiot-proof, and—if you’re not careful—neither are your conditional access policies. As always, the best security tool is the one you deploy thoughtfully, tune regularly, and test as if your job depended on it (because, well, it probably does).
Will there be pain in the migration? Of course. Will your users resist? Inevitably. But the rewards—a smaller attack surface, cloud agility, easier compliance, fewer “all-access passes” floating in hacker forums—are too compelling to ignore.
So, take a page from Richard Hicks: trade your VPN nostalgia for real, adaptive access controls, and let your organization step confidently into the zero-trust era. In a landscape where every endpoint is a potential breach vector, explicit trust and rigorous validation aren’t just trendy—they’re mandatory. And remember, there’s no “Quick Connect” button for trust, but with Entra, at least you’re closer than ever.
And if you’re still clinging to your VPN? Enjoy telling your grandkids about it someday, right before they hologram you documentation for Entra 4.0.
Source: Redmondmag.com Why Its Time to Move Beyond VPNs -- Redmondmag.com
VPNs: The Ancient Relic That Won’t Retire
Let’s face it: the humble VPN has been the backbone of remote access security for decades, its legacy status almost guaranteed by the stubborn familiarity of usernames and passwords. Ask any IT pro managing a mature infrastructure, and you’ll likely hear a nostalgic defense of VPNs—still holding the fort for businesses wedded to classic Active Directory setups and loyal, domain-joined endpoints.But under the glare of modern threats, our beloved VPN is showing signs of senility. According to Microsoft security expert Richard Hicks—the Obi-Wan Kenobi of secure remote access—the greatest risk isn’t a zero-day exploit or some Star Wars-esque state actor. No, it’s the “lack of strong authentication.” Most organizations are still stuck in the username-and-password rut, a setup so vulnerable even an amateur phishing campaign can break it (no offense, Kevin from Accounts).
Phishing-resistant credentials, like hardware-backed digital certificates, are now the minimum ante. The industry’s push toward Entra Conditional Access is less about keeping up with the Joneses and more about not getting entirely wiped out in a breach.
And let’s not forget: the drawbridge analogy for VPNs keeps getting grimmer. Once you’re in, you’re in—lateral movement for attackers has never been easier. As Hicks dryly notes, it’s time to “reduce the attack surface.” Translation? Shrink your kingdom and post some guards with real training.
Why Entra Private Access is Stealing the VPN Spotlight
Enter Microsoft’s Entra Private Access—a modern, cloud-first, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution with none of the crusty baggage that comes with VPNs. Entra’s game-changing approach is its identity-centric model. Rather than swinging open the gates for anyone holding valid VPN credentials, Entra makes you show your ID, submit to a background check, and maybe even tell a good joke before you get through the door.Here’s the kind of granular control you get: administrators specify, in excruciating detail, what network resources are exposed, and to whom. Gone, Hicks emphasizes, is the “all or nothing” access paradigm. Administrators craft access policies tighter than a company holiday party’s drink tickets. Need that internal HR app? Sure, if you pass Conditional Access checks and submit to multifactor authentication (MFA). Want to poke around in payroll? You’ll need something stronger than just your dog’s name as a password.
Hicks praises the seamless integration between Entra Private Access and Conditional Access. Adaptive policies? Check. Enforced credential standards? Double-check. The result is a continuously tuned access model, aligned to actual risk, not just wishful thinking.
Of course, the zero-trust approach comes with its own learning curve. Many organizations are used to VPNs behaving like omnipresent, benevolent network wizards—enabling access to all, with relatively little thought given to specifics. If only Gandalf had been as rigorous as Conditional Access policies, the history of Middle Earth (and your network logs) might look very different.
Surviving the Migration: Best Practices for Leaving VPNs Behind
Making the leap from a cozy VPN blanket to a brisk Zero Trust model isn’t quite as simple as installing a client and bestowing “cloud-first” upon your tech stack. Hicks warns that this transition is more evolution than revolution—which is consultant-speak for “don’t panic, but don’t drag your feet either.”The recommended migration playbook champions a smooth glide path. First up: activate Quick Access, an Entra Private Access feature that gently mimics your legacy VPN. It grants broad access—think of it as training wheels for the anxious. Meanwhile, Application Discovery takes notes in the background, mapping out actual application usage patterns. Only then, once IT can see what’s actually needed (spoiler alert: it’s rarely everything), does the shift to per-app and per-user policies begin.
This incremental approach is key. There's no one-click “Zero Trust Now” button, as much as Microsoft marketing might wish. Slow and steady wins the race—and spares IT from endless angry tickets about broken OneNote syncs.
The take-home for IT leaders? Embrace gradualism. Use the tools Entra provides to stage your security transformation, and remember: a phased approach is less likely to set Slack channels ablaze with all-caps “VPN DOWN?” cries at 2am.
Entra Private Access and Real-World Zero Trust Strategy
If you’ve spent any time in boardrooms or tech webinars this year, you know Zero Trust isn’t so much a “trend” as it is the only show in town. But what does it actually mean for organizations chugging along with legacy VPNs? According to Hicks, Entra Private Access is the neural spine of any practical Zero Trust framework.The secret sauce is the Entra Global Secure Access (GSA) client, which attaches location signals to endpoints and rolls them up into Conditional Access. Now, access decisions can drill down beyond the "Are you who you say you are?" level, asking "Are you somewhere you’re supposed to be?" It’s the difference between giving your kid the house keys and asking them to FaceTime you from the front door before you disarm the alarm system.
Organizations can now identify “trusted and compliant” network locations—and only then allow access. If an endpoint is wandering through a sketchy cyber-neighborhood or, worse, connected to a malware-filled coffee shop Wi-Fi, access is denied, no matter how good the credentials look on paper.
This approach finally delivers on Zero Trust’s central promise: never trust, always verify, and never hand over the keys to the castle without a good reason (and proof of address).
The Cloud-First Cure: Painkillers for IT Admins
For anyone who’s had to troubleshoot VPN tunnels, firewall rules, IPsec oddities, or negotiate another round of split DNS debacles, Entra’s fully cloud-based model is a literal breath of fresh, carbon-neutral Azure air. No more huddling over CLI manuals or diagramming ACLs on whiteboards that never erase all the way. Your migraine can be reserved for more interesting problems, like why Teams insists on updating every Tuesday at 1:59 p.m.Hicks’ enthusiasm for Zero Trust and cloud-first isn’t the starry-eyed optimism of a vendor pitchman. It’s the relief of someone who’s spent too many weekends babysitting ailing VPN concentrators in cold server rooms while birthday parties passed him by. With Entra, there’s no infrastructure weight—just service, scale, and security signals managed from the comfort of anywhere that isn’t a data center.
Real-World Implications for IT Pros (And a Friendly Rant)
The promise of a more secure future is always entangled with the reality of implementation. Will your users thank you when their “anywhere, anytime” VPN becomes “anywhere, anytime (with extra steps)”? Of course not. Your C-suite will ask if productivity will dip, while your sec-ops team will quietly plot to automate every manual access ticket.And let’s be blunt: zero-trust means more than checking a “cloud-first” box. It means laundry-listing your applications, organizing your user groups, and actually following through with MFA enforcement even when pushback is loud and persistent. You’ll need clear policies and a real understanding of how your app ecosystem is structured—which, if you’re like most organizations, is somewhere between “sophisticated” and “ancient collection of mystery .exes hosted under someone’s desk.”
The upside? Attackers will find your new environment far less welcoming. Lateral movement becomes significantly tougher; “phish-and-go” credential attacks are stopped at the gate. Compliance teams sleep better. Your IT help desk will—eventually—field fewer “I got locked out of everything” calls for suspicious activity.
Still, transitions always unsettle: users locked out for failing conditional checks, admins grappling with new dashboard interfaces, and the unavoidable learning curve that comes with any paradigm shift. Patience and phased rollouts are your armor.
Hidden Risks and Notable Strengths: What Vendors Won’t Tell You
Now, for a little healthy skepticism—because no product, no matter how much AI and cloud sparkle it has, is immune to pitfalls.Zero trust done badly can wreck morale faster than a broken coffee machine. If you botch your app discovery phase, you risk severing legitimate access, invoking rage and downtime in equal measure. Overzealous conditional policies can paint you into a corner, while coarse settings—meant to “just turn it on!”—don’t actually improve your security as much as you’d hope.
And then there’s the mixed blessing of cloud dependency. Outages on Microsoft’s end will impact your day-to-day far more than the average VPN hiccup. SLA math goes both ways. Entra and Azure do offer reliably high availability, but they’re not immune to global service interruptions—the rare, but devastating “cloudpocalypse” we all dread but secretly love to meme about.
On the positive side, Entra Private Access puts unprecedented visibility and control in your hands. No more smoke-and-mirrors guessing about who accessed what, from where, and why—this level of auditing is the analytics candy IT security teams crave. Plus, as regulations pile up, it’s much easier to prove you’ve implemented “strong, adaptive access controls” if you’re running Entra rather than shoehorning logs from three generations of VPN products into your audit reports.
What Does the Future Hold for Zero Trust and Entra? (And Will VPNs Fade Away?)
If you listen to Hicks—or, frankly, any Microsoft security evangelist—the era of VPN dominance is in its twilight. Zero trust is on the ascendant, partly because it’s more secure, and partly because compliance teams everywhere have found religion in “least privilege” and “explicit access.”Yet legacy VPNs will not go gently into that good night. There are still corners of the enterprise world clinging to VPNs out of habit, inertia, and a certain nostalgic comfort. It’s a bit like still faxing contracts “just to be sure.” Give it five more years, and VPN-fueled nostalgia may be the only thing keeping some server rooms warm.
Entra Private Access—and other cloud-native ZTNA contenders—will increasingly become the backbone for remote access, especially as hybrid work cements itself as the status quo. Admins who embrace this change will weather fewer breaches, field friendlier compliance audits, and, hopefully, enjoy fewer late-night alerts from jittery VPN concentrators.
Still, vigilance is crucial: ZTNA isn’t idiot-proof, and—if you’re not careful—neither are your conditional access policies. As always, the best security tool is the one you deploy thoughtfully, tune regularly, and test as if your job depended on it (because, well, it probably does).
Conclusion: The Last VPN User (and Why You Shouldn’t Be Them)
Today’s enterprise security is less about castles and moats, more about identity, continuous validation, and, let’s admit it, the sweet taste of automation. The case for moving beyond VPNs has never been clearer. Products like Microsoft’s Entra Private Access let IT teams navigate this shift with more grace and assurance than ever before.Will there be pain in the migration? Of course. Will your users resist? Inevitably. But the rewards—a smaller attack surface, cloud agility, easier compliance, fewer “all-access passes” floating in hacker forums—are too compelling to ignore.
So, take a page from Richard Hicks: trade your VPN nostalgia for real, adaptive access controls, and let your organization step confidently into the zero-trust era. In a landscape where every endpoint is a potential breach vector, explicit trust and rigorous validation aren’t just trendy—they’re mandatory. And remember, there’s no “Quick Connect” button for trust, but with Entra, at least you’re closer than ever.
And if you’re still clinging to your VPN? Enjoy telling your grandkids about it someday, right before they hologram you documentation for Entra 4.0.
Source: Redmondmag.com Why Its Time to Move Beyond VPNs -- Redmondmag.com
