# Zero-Trust Makes Working From Home Secure And Reliable, Unlike VPN

- Link: https://www.agilicus.com/zero-trust-work-from-home/
- Published: 2020-03-18T02:09:53+00:00
- Author: Don Bowman

Monday I made the difficult decision to send the team to work from home. Since everyone
takes public transit, it would not be fair to leave it to individuals to decide,
they might feel pressured. This makes me sad since we are all about Agile, which
values live face-to-face discussions.

What was not a concern for me was remote access. We are 100% Zero-Trust. The network
is not part of the trust model. You are no different on our corporate network than
on a mobile network or airport WiFi. Each service authenticates the user (using 
2-Factor authentication), directly. No L2TP, no PPTP, no IPSEC, none of these. This
means that we can scale just as easily on-site as off-site. The number of remote
users does not matter.

Monday night I helped my wife set up her VPN access for remote to work. It was, 
um, not modern. A different login experience. Web pages that ran on a local network
and didn’t have domain names. A VPN that worked inside some browser tabs, but not
all. Popup windows. It was device specific, curated, complex to maintain. And one
thing I know about security: complex to maintain implies insecure. It may look secure
with all the facades, but underneath it, something is not setup properly. I was 
very sad, how could things be this bad?

I’ve talked earlier in [Secure Exposed Access](https://www.agilicus.com/project/secure-exposed-access/)
about how you could, with an increase in security and decrease in complexity, get
rid of the VPN and expose individual applications to the Internet. In such a fashion
that only authenticated users would see them. I think its a better model. It gives
you a lot of the value of SaaS, without the short term transition issues. It gives
you better segmentation and simpler deployment (on the client, on the network) than
the VPN.

Be safe, work from home, be productive. When you come out of your shells, challenge
the status quo. Next time can be better.