Zero Trust vs. Legacy VPNs: What Federal & Military Leaders Need to Know Now

This episode of The Bottom Line Up Front provides a concise review of a Zero Trust Table Talk session focusing on cybersecurity for federal and military IT leaders. The discussion covers the transition from traditional VPNs to Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), emphasizing the increased security against AI-accelerated exploits and zero-day vulnerabilities. The session highlights ZTNA benefits like reducing attack surfaces, improving user experience through direct routing, and providing granular logging for compliance, all without needing to replace existing systems. Practical steps for implementing ZTNA are detailed, underscoring its role as a critical overlay for securing remote access in federal missions.

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:37 Zero Trust Table Talk Insights
• 01:30 The Evolution of Remote Access Strategies
• 02:02 The Case Against Legacy VPNs
• 03:50 Understanding Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
• 05:05 Operational Wins with ZTNA
• 09:16 Implementing ZTNA: Steps and Best Practices
• 10:19 Conclusion and Call to Action

This episode is brought to you by ATP Gov. Visit us online at www.atpgov.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bottom Line Upfront, the podcast that cuts through the noise to deliver distilled insights from today’s most important technical webinars, presentations and demonstrations designed for federal and military IT leaders. Each episode breaks down complex technologies into mission ready takeaways, so you get the key points.

Fast. Whether it’s cybersecurity, cloud, architecture, or emerging defense technologies, we highlight what matters most and how trusted integrators like a TP gov can help implement and operationalize these solutions across your agency or command. No fluff. No filler, just the bottom line upfront. At a Zero Trust Table Talk session featuring leaders from App Gate and two season MSPs who support regulated industries.

We got insight into their frontline perspective, which maps directly to federal and defense realities, those being the rising attack surface compliance, pressure, and operator fatigue. Five years ago there was a series of supply chain. Compromises. And I [00:01:00] think at that point we really started trying to figure out how to de-risk our portfolio.

SSL VPNs were a part of that process. You know, one of the things that, that we’ve seen change over the last several years is the timing between when a vulnerability is a zero day and there’s targeted exploitation to when it’s discovered. There’s a a series of really high velocity mass exploitations. We saw that as too big a risk to continue to have in our service offering.

We don’t wanna be the component that was the cause of the failure. And at that point we decided to transition to a, a remote access strategy that we felt created less risk for us and for our clients. We’re gonna focus on reviewing this webinar and take the hard lessons learned about VPNs and how zero trust changes the game and where you should modernize without disrupting mission critical operations.

And you can read the studies over the last two years that AI is turning one day or O day stuff into exploit so much quicker than everything else. There’s not gonna be enough time to patch attack [00:02:00] surface in the future. I don’t think. In today’s threat landscape, legacy VPNs aren’t just outdated. They’re a liability from AI accelerated exploits to relentless zero days.

We’ve reached a tipping point. If your mission depends on uninterrupted secure access, the conversation must move beyond VPNs to zero trust. The SANS top five ICS and OT controls has secure remote access listed there. And I think if you’re not taking a more of a proactive approach to securing those environments, John, to your point, you’re gonna be in trouble.

Attackers weaponize vulnerabilities faster, often in hours, and no longer in days. The MSPs describe weekly emergency patching perimeter zero day triage and burnout in government terms. This means your risk window is widening while your patch window is collapsing. Traditional VPN concentrators and perimeter firewalls expose services directly to the public internet.

When A-C-V-S-S 10 shows up, you patch tonight. Not because you want to, but because the architecture forces you to. The posturing was huge for us. I [00:03:00] wanted to put nack everywhere, and anybody who’s been working in the business long enough knows that traditional NAC is hot garbage and a pain in the butt to keep and maintain, and this has been a breath of fresh air.

It just works incredibly well. We’re able to posture security software hatching among other kind of unique things to our services where we wanna make sure you’re running certain things or you’re part of a certain network or whatnot. That’s given us an amazing amount of flexibility. And whether it’s CMMC, NIST Frameworks, PCI or other compliance requirements, agencies and contractors are being pushed to prove their secure remote access, not just asserted.

Taking into consideration the aging infrastructure and legacy VPNs, this increases your attack. Surface drives operator fatigue and doesn’t align with zero trust mandates, permissions that cannot fail good enough, remote access isn’t good enough anymore. So let’s talk a little bit more about Zero Trust, and in this case, zero Trust, network access or ZTNA.

It starts with a simple premise. Never trust, always [00:04:00] verify continuously. That means least privilege tied to identity, device, posture, context, that being location, time and role, and real-time policy enforcement. What we have in terms of our architecture is, you know, we host the controllers. Then we put gateways at client sites so clients can have a better user experience because their traffic is directly routed to them.

It doesn’t have to go through us first. They may have traffic that comes to us. Really, the efficiency of the platform from a user experience standpoint. Is that your traffic doesn’t have to go any place. It really doesn’t need to. And we’ve seen a lot of user performance issues with the hub and spoke model where, you know, you might have a user on the west Coast, VPN concentrator on the east coast in a resource in AWS.

Oregon and you know that traffic is traversing the country several times. It’s just not a good user experience. So I think for us, the components of App Gate in our ability to deploy them, how and where we thought they should be [00:05:00] deployed to optimize resiliency and user experience. We didn’t see a lot of platforms that could do that.

The MSPs in the session noted four operational wins, the first being attack surface reduction. No exposed VPN portals and access is dynamically brokered only to authorize resources. Second conditional access and posture checks. They enforce OS patch level running security controls network segment and MFA before granting access.

Third, direct routing improves the user experience. The MSPs have ditched, hub and spoke tunnels. They route securely and directly to their resources, and this is crucial for RDP and OT slash ics and latency sensitive workloads. And finally, granular visibility and logs. The MSPs urge that you know who accessed what, when, and under what posture.

That’s gold. For auditors as well as ETO packages. Top of the list would be it allowed us to change the conversation to a risk conversation. When we started talking about zt, we had to explain kind of our work, why [00:06:00] we thought it was important. So we got to start talking about risk, and as soon as we started talking about risk, the customer’s ears start perking up.

That’s a language they understand. So for federal and military environments. Including hybrid, legacy and edge. The ability to bolt on ZTNA in front of older systems matters immensely. Even mainframes or OT assets without modern authentication could be protected with policy posture and MFA without rewriting your entire enterprise.

So let’s look at this with a federal mission lens zero. Trust network access helps prevent lateral movement by collapsing implicit trust. If an endpoint fails posture or a roll changes, access can be revoked in real time. That’s how you limit the blast radius zt. A’s granular logs and entitlement definitions align cleanly with.

Framework mappings. For instance, NIST 800 dash 2 0 7 0, trust NIST 853 controls a CIA AU and SI families. And when auditors ask, show me, you can show them. Under the guise of operational resilience, we want to [00:07:00] allow a work from anywhere scenario, enforcing posture, whether the user is OCONUS conus, or on a partner network.

And we wanna be able to integrate across on-Prem, GovCloud, and Tactical Edge, creating a bridge between hybrid and legacy infrastructures. And the last part of operational resilience in this framework relies on replacing fragile VPN jump boxes with policy-driven, identity-based access for operations that cannot tolerate noisy tunnel.

I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure is the pitchforks would be coming out from the engineering team. ’cause they’re tired of dealing with this stuff. From a customer’s perspective, they never don’t have availability into that platform. And when we’re doing UTMs and things like that, that’s often the case as we’ve gotta have patch windows and there’s gotta be downtime.

People are gonna lose availability for a small amount of time. And if we’re doing this frequently, it makes an impact. So even if App Gate had a 10. It’s not on the internet. Nobody can see it on the internet. So if we have a CBE E 10 and it’s on the internet, we can take a second and figure [00:08:00] out what’s going on where?

If it’s a UTM and it’s CVSS 10, we gotta do that that night. We gotta get that done immediately. That attack surface thing has just been a huge boon for us. What we really need to do is focus on less firefighting and more readiness. Examples given during the webinar by the MSPs saw tens to hundreds of hours reclaimed from emergency patching and concentrator maintenance.

For federal teams, that headroom translates to more time on threat hunting control assessments and mission work decisions must be defensible to leadership oversight bodies and the inspector generals. It’s easier to defend an architecture that reduces exposure by design than to explain why you knew a risk and did nothing about it.

When you can articulate the risk and trade-offs and show data that posture, controls and entitlements are working, trust goes up and not down. I don’t know if anybody’s patched UTMs and clusters and things like that. Some of ’em do a really good job of managing that. Some of them don’t. And App Gate does an amazing job.

When we do an update. It [00:09:00] pushes out iteratively throughout the entire customer base, and it’s taking into account HA and things like that. So we can do these things with zero customer impact or minimal customer impact. On top of that, we’re not doing it every week, so certainly saved us a lot of time. But implementing Zero Trust isn’t just a production selection, it’s operationalized.

Here are a few steps that you should consider when building out your ZTNA framework. Step one, identify exposed surfaces, perimeter dependencies and VPN heavy paths, map likely kill chains, and the blast radius. Step two, pilot internally quote, eat your own dog food. Run your ZTNA framework alongside existing VPNs for a subset of users, those being operators, admins, and latency sensitive roles, validate posture checks, MFA, and entitlement logic.

Step three, integrate your logs. Feed all of your ZTNA logs into your SIM or SOAR for behavior audit and incident response. Build reports that answer auditor questions before they ask. Step four, [00:10:00] expand by risk, prioritize high impact segments, including privilege access, OT slash ics, remote admin and cloud consoles.

And finally, document architecture choices and the compliance mappings that you’ve chosen. Show how your ZTNA framework aligns with zero trust strategies and reduces your reliance on exposure perimeter services. So what was the bottom line upfront of this particular webinar? It really comes down to the idea that zero trust network access is not a rip and replace.

It’s a risk-based overlay that can run in parallel and progressively absorb legacy access patterns. As you’re ready, legacy VPNs expand, attack surface and operational risk. The exploit velocity outpaces the patching. ZTNA reduces exposure by design. It’s identity centric, posture base, and conditional access limits blast radius and approves user experience.

And you don’t have to rip and replace because ZTNA can run alongside your existing VPNs and you can migrate entitlements by risk. And remember that logging and visibility matter [00:11:00] ZTNA gives precise who, what, when. Posture for compliance and incident response. And in the end, you need to partner for outcomes and not products.

At a TP gov, we help you operationalize zero trust aligned to federal mandates, mission needs, and legacy realities. So if your remote access still hinges on Legacy VPNs, it’s time to re-baseline. Connect with us to discuss a low risk ZTNA pilot tailored to your mission, your compliance obligations, and your operational tempo.

Be sure to reach out to ATB COV today at www.atpgov.comoremailinfoatatpgov.com or check us out on social media. On LinkedIn. Thanks for listening, and be sure to subscribe to the bottom line upfront wherever you get your podcasts. And stay tuned for more distilled insights from the front lines of tech and national security.

So until next time, stay secure. Stay mission ready.

The Bottom Line Up Front, is ATP Gov’s podcast that cuts through the noise to deliver distilled insights from today’s most important technical webinars, presentations and demonstrations designed for federal and military IT leaders. Each episode breaks down complex technologies into mission ready takeaways, so you get the key points.

Fast.

Whether it’s cybersecurity, cloud, architecture, or emerging defense technologies, we highlight what matters most and how trusted integrators like ATP Gov can help implement and operationalize these solutions across your agency or command.

No fluff. No filler, just the bottom line up front.