VPN Replacement Problems No One Wants to Talk About
The traditional VPN is a bit like handing someone the keys to your house and hoping they only open the fridge. It assumes that once you’ve proven who you are, you won’t do anything weird. Unfortunately, attackers love that assumption—which is why VPN credentials are traded on the dark web like baseball cards.
ZTNA arrived to fix this mess. It pitched itself as the smarter VPN replacement. “What if we didn’t trust anyone?” Great idea. But in practice? Many ZTNA solutions took the “trust no one” concept a little too literally—including the user.
Legacy ZTNA offerings often come with clunky clients, dodgy browser plugins, and brittle integrations. They force you to reshape your network, wrestle with bloated policy engines, and ask users to adopt Yet Another Password™—or worse, install Yet Another App™.
Security improves. Productivity tanks. IT cries into its keyboard.
This was supposed to be a VPN replacement—not a trade-off.
How Portnox ZTNA Does It Differently
Portnox ZTNA is built on three uncompromising principles: zero trust, zero friction, and zero clients.
1. Zero Clients, Zero Agents, Zero Headaches
Portnox ZTNA requires no special clients, plugins, or agents. Users connect to internal web apps through their regular browsers and standard URLs—just like they always have. The difference? Behind the scenes, they’re being vetted for identity, role, device posture, and location before access is granted. The user never sees the magic. They just see it working.
2. Passwordless Authentication
Let’s be honest—passwords are the weak link. With Portnox ZTNA, users authenticate securely without ever typing one. It’s fast. It’s secure. And most importantly, it’s not phishing-friendly.
3. Risk-Based Access That’s Actually Useful
Every access attempt is checked against device posture and security policy. Is the laptop patched? Is it encrypted? Is it in the right place? If something’s off, remediation is automated—no help desk ticket required. Noncompliant devices get turned away or locked down until they shape up.
4. No Network Changes Required
Your network stays exactly as it is. No inbound ports. No firewall reconfigurations. Portnox ZTNA uses outbound-only connections to establish secure tunnels. That means a dramatically smaller attack surface and a far happier IT team.
What This Means for Your Organization
With Portnox ZTNA, your team can access critical web-based applications securely from anywhere—without the performance drag of a VPN or the frustration of a clunky ZTNA deployment. And IT gets centralized visibility, granular control, and reduced risk without deploying an agent army or setting up an entirely new perimeter.
Finance teams like it because it’s cost-effective. Security teams love it because it actually works. And users… well, they don’t notice it. Which is kind of the point.
Portnox ZTNA is more than a VPN replacement. It’s designed to reduce support tickets, speed up access times, and improve security posture across organizations. When security becomes invisible, you know you’re doing something right.
This Is Just the Beginning
Right now, Portnox ZTNA provides fast, passwordless access to internal web-based applications. But our roadmap is already in motion. Soon, we’ll expand support to non-web, legacy, and even on-prem applications—all under the same zero trust umbrella, with the same cloud-native simplicity.
The long-term vision? Unified Access Control: one cloud platform that manages access for every user, device, and resource—whether it’s wired, wireless, remote, on-prem, or in the cloud.
And yes, it all works together. RADIUS. NAC. TACACS+. And now, ZTNA. In one platform. With one policy engine. From one UI.
A VPN Replacement that Doesn’t Suck…In Fact, It’s FREE
Tired of clunky VPNs or ZTNA platforms that feel like they were built by a committee? Same. That’s why we built Portnox ZTNA to be different—lightweight, lightning-fast, and frictionless for users and admins alike.
And now, you can try it for free.
This isn’t just another access control solution. It’s part of our mission to make modern, secure connectivity effortless—especially for today’s hybrid workforce. No hardware. No agents. No nonsense.
Get started with the free version of Portnox ZTNA today—and experience secure remote access the way it should be.