Retiring the VPN: Zero Trust without the pain
Why identity-aware access beats legacy VPNs, and a pragmatic 30-day plan to migrate to Cloudflare Zero Trust.
Legacy VPNs were built for a world where everyone sat inside the office. Today your team is everywhere, your apps live across a dozen clouds, and a single set of stolen credentials can expose the entire flat network behind the tunnel.
Zero Trust flips the model: instead of trusting the network, you verify every request against identity and device posture. Access is granted per-application, logged, and revocable in seconds.
Our 30-day migration starts by inventorying applications and identities, then layering Cloudflare Access in front of the highest-risk apps first. By week four most clients have retired their VPN entirely — with full audit trails and happier users.