Zero Trust has become one of those terms that means everything and nothing depending on who’s using it. The core idea is simple enough: don’t assume that anything or anyone on your network is trustworthy just because they’re already on it. But when it comes to remote access security specifically, what does that actually change about how you grant, manage, and monitor access?
This post covers exactly that: how authentication, access scoping, session management, and logging all change when you stop treating network access as a proxy for trust.
Verifying Identity Per Session, Not Per Login
Verifying identity at the start of a session tells you who someone is at that moment. It doesn’t say anything about what they should be able to do once they’re in, or for how long. Under a Zero Trust approach, those are separate questions that get answered separately. MFA is required per session, access requests go through an approval workflow before anything is granted, and sessions terminate automatically when the work is done.
This matters most when credentials are compromised. In a perimeter-based model, stolen credentials hand an attacker whatever standing access that user had. In a Zero Trust model, they hand an attacker a starting point that still has to clear the same verification and approval process as any legitimate session. The blast radius of a credential compromise shrinks considerably when there’s no standing access to inherit.
Separating Network Access From System Access
VPN-based remote access puts users on the network and relies on them staying within appropriate boundaries. For employees on managed devices that’s a reasonable assumption, but it breaks down with vendors, contractors, and third parties who have legitimate reasons to connect but no business touching anything beyond the specific system they’re there for.
Zero Trust draws that line explicitly. Access is granted to specific systems, for specific purposes, and for a defined window of time. A vendor troubleshooting a server gets access to that server. When the session ends, so does the access. There’s no residual visibility into the rest of the network, no persistent connection to revisit later, and no reliance on the vendor staying in their lane because they simply can’t leave it.
This also simplifies offboarding considerably. When access is session-based rather than standing, there’s nothing to revoke when a vendor relationship ends or a contractor’s project wraps up. The access expired when the session did.
Why Persistent Connections Are a Liability
Persistent remote access connections are convenient, but they represent trust that was established at some point in the past and never revisited. Just-In-Time access means connections are established only when there’s an active, approved reason for them and terminated when that reason no longer exists. The practical effect is that your remote access surface shrinks dramatically when nobody is using it, which is most of the time.
For organizations managing large numbers of endpoints, vendors, and remote users, this shifts the default state of your remote access environment from open unless explicitly closed to closed unless explicitly opened. That’s a meaningful reduction in standing exposure, and one of the more operationally significant things Zero Trust changes about how remote access works in practice.
Logging That Reflects What Happened
Visibility is central to Zero Trust, and for remote access security that means logging that goes beyond recording whether a connection was made. A connection log tells you that someone accessed a system. It doesn’t tell you what they did when they got there or whether their activity looked normal.
Session-level logging captures what happened during a session: which systems were accessed, what actions were taken, and how long the session ran. Session recording for sensitive systems takes that further, giving you a complete record that’s useful for incident response, internal reviews, and compliance audits. Combined with approval workflows that document why access was granted in the first place, you end up with an audit trail that tells a coherent story rather than just confirming that a connection existed.
How Admin By Request’s Secure Remote Access Solution Puts This Into Practice
Our Secure Remote Access solution is built around these principles directly. Access is browser-based and Just-In-Time, meaning there are no persistent VPN tunnels and no standing connections. Every session requires an approved request before it’s established and is terminated automatically when it’s done.
Identity verification is handled through built-in MFA, and access scoping is enforced at the session level across all three access modes:
- Unattended Access for admin-initiated sessions to enrolled endpoints
- Vendor Access for external parties who connect through a scoped external portal without ever touching the Admin By Request portal itself
- Remote Support for live sessions between IT staff and end users
Every session is fully logged, and optional session recording is available for environments where a complete audit trail is required. The solution integrates directly into the existing Admin By Request platform, so the approval workflows, audit logs, and access controls all sit in the same place as the rest of your endpoint security management.
If you want to see how it works in practice, you can sign up for our free plan, which gives you full access for up to 25 endpoints, free forever.
Building Toward Zero Trust
Applying Zero Trust principles to remote access security doesn’t require rebuilding everything at once. Most organizations find it practical to work through it in stages, starting with auditing existing persistent connections and eliminating anything that doesn’t have a clear, ongoing justification.
From there, the focus typically shifts to access scoping: defining what vendors and contractors can reach and enforcing that at the session level rather than relying on network boundaries. Session-level MFA and approval workflows for sensitive systems usually follow, along with a review of whether logging is capturing session activity or just connection events.
None of this has to happen simultaneously. The principles are consistent regardless of where you start, and each change builds on the last.
