Every morning, the same ritual plays out across thousands of organizations: employees open their laptops, launch the VPN client, enter their credentials, wait for authentication, watch the connection attempt, see it fail, try again, and finally-maybe-get connected. Then they lose connectivity walking to a meeting room, and the process starts over.
This is VPN fatigue, and it’s costing your organization more than you realize.
VPN technology was designed in the 1990s for a different era-one where remote work was the exception, employees connected from fixed locations, and the goal was simply to extend the corporate network to a handful of road warriors. Today, that same technology struggles under the weight of hybrid workforces, cloud applications, and employees who expect the seamless experience they get from every other digital tool in their lives.
This article examines why VPN fatigue has become a critical issue for IT leaders, the real costs it imposes on organizations, and practical approaches to modernize remote access without sacrificing security.
The Anatomy of VPN Fatigue
What Employees Actually Experience
VPN fatigue isn’t about laziness or resistance to security. It’s a rational response to a genuinely frustrating user experience. Understanding what employees actually encounter helps explain why workarounds and shadow IT flourish.
The Daily Friction Points:
Friction Point | Employee Experience | Frequency |
Initial Connection | Launch client, enter credentials, wait 15-45 seconds | 2-5 times daily |
Re-authentication | Session timeouts requiring full reconnection | Every 4-8 hours |
Network Switching | Disconnection when moving between Wi-Fi networks | Multiple times daily |
Split Tunneling Confusion | Uncertainty about which apps require VPN | Ongoing |
Performance Degradation | Slower application response, video call quality issues | Continuous when connected |
Connection Failures | Retry cycles, help desk calls, lost productivity | Weekly for many users |
A 2025 survey of IT administrators found that VPN-related issues account for approximately 30 percent of help desk tickets in organizations with hybrid workforces. Each ticket represents not just IT staff time but employee frustration and lost productivity.
The Psychology of Friction
Small frictions compound. A 30-second connection delay seems trivial in isolation, but when multiplied across five reconnections daily, 250 working days per year, and hundreds or thousands of employees, the aggregate impact becomes substantial.
More importantly, friction changes behavior. When accessing a resource requires extra steps, employees make unconscious calculations: Is this task important enough to justify the hassle? Can I accomplish it another way? Can it wait until I’m in the office?
These calculations lead to delayed decisions, incomplete information sharing, and-most concerning for security teams-workarounds that bypass security controls entirely.
The Real Costs of VPN Fatigue
Productivity Loss
Conservative estimates suggest employees lose 15-30 minutes daily to VPN-related friction. For an organization with 1,000 employees at an average fully-loaded cost of $75 per hour, this translates to:
Daily Productivity Cost Calculation:
Scenario | Time Lost/Employee/Day | Annual Hours Lost (1,000 employees) | Annual Cost |
Conservative (15 min) | 0.25 hours | 62,500 hours | $4.7 million |
Moderate (22 min) | 0.37 hours | 92,500 hours | $6.9 million |
High Friction (30 min) | 0.50 hours | 125,000 hours | $9.4 million |
These figures account only for direct time loss. They don’t include the cognitive cost of context switching, the meetings that start late because someone couldn’t connect, or the decisions delayed because accessing information felt like too much effort.
Help Desk Burden
VPN issues consume IT resources disproportionate to their complexity. Common help desk scenarios include:
- Password reset requests triggered by VPN authentication failures
- Troubleshooting connection issues that resolve themselves
- Explaining split tunneling behavior to confused users
- Addressing performance complaints that trace back to VPN routing
- Supporting users who’ve forgotten how to use the VPN after office-based periods
Organizations report that VPN-related tickets average 15-20 minutes to resolve, with many requiring escalation. At a typical help desk cost of $25-40 per ticket, organizations with significant VPN friction can spend $200,000-500,000 annually on VPN support alone.
Shadow IT and Security Risks
The most dangerous cost of VPN fatigue is invisible: employees finding ways around the VPN entirely. When the VPN feels like an obstacle, users discover that many cloud applications work fine without it. They start using personal devices, consumer file-sharing services, and unauthorized communication tools.
A 2025 study found that 67 percent of employees admit to using non-approved applications for work tasks, with “avoiding VPN hassle” cited as a primary motivation. This shadow IT creates blind spots for security teams and expands the attack surface in ways that are difficult to quantify until a breach occurs.
Why Traditional VPNs Can’t Keep Up
Architecture Designed for a Different Era
VPN technology was architected around assumptions that no longer hold:
Outdated Assumption 1: The perimeter is the security boundary.
VPNs extend the trusted corporate network to remote users. Once connected, users have broad network access similar to being physically in the office. This made sense when applications lived in on-premises data centers and employees worked from corporate facilities most of the time.
Today, with applications distributed across multiple clouds, SaaS platforms, and data centers, the concept of a single network perimeter has dissolved. VPNs force traffic through that legacy perimeter even when it’s not the efficient path to the resource.
Outdated Assumption 2: Remote work is occasional.
Traditional VPN infrastructure was sized for a fraction of the workforce connecting simultaneously. The shift to hybrid work overwhelmed VPN concentrators, forced emergency capacity expansions, and exposed the scalability limitations inherent in the architecture.
Outdated Assumption 3: Network access equals resource access.
VPNs grant network-level access. Once connected, users can potentially reach any system on that network segment. This violates the principle of least privilege and creates lateral movement opportunities for attackers who compromise a single endpoint.
Performance Realities
VPN performance suffers from fundamental architectural constraints:
Backhauling: Traffic from remote users often routes through corporate data centers even when the destination is a cloud application. A user in Singapore accessing a SaaS application hosted in Singapore might have their traffic routed through headquarters in New York, adding hundreds of milliseconds of latency.
Encryption Overhead: While encryption processing has become faster, VPN protocols still impose overhead, particularly on bandwidth-intensive applications like video conferencing.
Concentration Points: VPN traffic funnels through limited gateway infrastructure, creating bottlenecks. During peak usage, performance degrades for everyone.
Protocol Limitations: Many VPN protocols struggle with modern network conditions-packet loss, network switching, and the high-bandwidth requirements of contemporary applications.
VPN Performance Impact by Application Type:
Application Type | Typical Latency Impact | User Experience Effect |
Email/Messaging | +50-150ms | Noticeable delay |
Web Applications | +100-300ms | Sluggish navigation |
Video Conferencing | +150-500ms | Quality degradation, sync issues |
File Transfers | 20-40% throughput reduction | Extended wait times |
Real-Time Collaboration | +200-600ms | Frustrating lag |
What Employees Actually Want
Understanding user expectations clarifies the target state for any VPN replacement strategy.
Seamless Access
Employees want to open an application and have it work-the same experience they have with consumer services. They don’t think about authentication mechanisms when using Netflix or online banking; they expect work applications to function similarly.
Modern users have been conditioned by consumer technology to expect:
- Persistent sessions that don’t require repeated authentication
- Automatic reconnection when network conditions change
- Consistent performance regardless of location
- Simple, intuitive interfaces that don’t require training
Consistent Experience Across Contexts
Today’s employees work from home offices, coffee shops, airport lounges, client sites, and occasionally the actual office. They switch between corporate laptops, personal devices, and mobile phones. They expect work to function consistently across all these contexts.
VPNs, with their device-specific clients, network-dependent behavior, and varying performance, fail this expectation repeatedly.
Transparency and Control
Users want to understand what’s happening with their connection. VPN clients that display cryptic error messages, fail silently, or behave unpredictably erode trust and increase frustration. Employees prefer systems that communicate clearly and give them appropriate visibility into their connectivity status.
Modern Approaches to Secure Remote Access
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
Zero Trust Network Access represents a fundamental architectural shift from VPN thinking. Rather than extending network access to remote users, ZTNA provides application-specific access based on verified identity and context.
Core ZTNA Principles:
- Identity-Centric: Access decisions based on verified user and device identity, not network location
- Application-Level: Users connect to specific applications, not network segments
- Continuous Verification: Trust is evaluated throughout the session, not just at connection time
- Least Privilege: Users receive minimum necessary access, reducing blast radius if compromised
VPN vs. ZTNA Comparison:
Characteristic | Traditional VPN | ZTNA |
Access Scope | Network-level | Application-level |
Trust Model | Trust after authentication | Continuous verification |
User Experience | Client-heavy, connection-oriented | Often clientless, seamless |
Scalability | Constrained by concentrator capacity | Cloud-native, elastic |
Visibility | Network traffic logs | Application-level audit trails |
Lateral Movement Risk | High (network access) | Minimal (no network access) |
Reverse Access Architecture
An emerging approach eliminates inbound connections entirely. In reverse access models, internal resources initiate outbound connections to secure brokers, and those brokers mediate user access.
This architecture offers several advantages:
- Invisible Infrastructure: Internal resources have no exposed attack surface
- No Inbound Firewall Rules: Eliminates entire categories of misconfiguration risk
- Natural Segmentation: Each application connection is isolated
- Simplified Connectivity: Users connect to the broker; the broker handles the complexity
For users, reverse access often means no VPN client at all-access happens through a browser or thin client with minimal friction.
Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP)
Software-Defined Perimeter approaches create dynamic, identity-based perimeters around individual resources. The network itself becomes less relevant; what matters is whether a specific user with a specific device meets the policy requirements to access a specific application.
SDP implementations typically combine:
- Strong identity verification (often multi-factor)
- Device posture assessment
- Contextual access policies
- Encrypted, direct connections to authorized resources
Practical Implementation: Moving Beyond VPN
Assessment Phase
Before implementing changes, understand your current state:
- Quantify the Problem
Gather data on:
- VPN-related help desk ticket volume and resolution time
- User satisfaction scores specifically for remote access
- Authentication failure rates and retry patterns
- Bandwidth utilization on VPN concentrators
- Application performance metrics for remote vs. on-premises users
- Map Application Access Patterns
Document:
- Which applications employees access remotely
- Data sensitivity levels for each application
- Current authentication requirements
- Network dependencies and traffic flows
- Identify Quick Wins and High-Impact Changes
Prioritize based on:
- User population affected
- Friction severity
- Implementation complexity
- Security risk of current state
Architecture Design
Design the target state with both security and user experience in mind:
Principle 1: Application-Centric Access
Define access at the application level, not the network level. Users should connect to specific applications they’re authorized to use, not to network segments containing those applications.
Principle 2: Identity as the Perimeter
Make identity verification the foundation of access decisions. Strong authentication, combined with device posture and contextual signals, should determine what a user can reach.
Principle 3: Assume Breach
Design so that compromise of any single component-an endpoint, a credential, an application-doesn’t cascade. Microsegmentation and least-privilege access contain potential damage.
Principle 4: User Experience as a Requirement
Treat user experience as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Solutions that users circumvent provide no security benefit.
Migration Strategy
Transitioning from VPN to modern access requires careful planning:
Phase 1: Parallel Deployment (Weeks 1-8)
Deploy new access infrastructure alongside existing VPN. Begin with low-risk applications and volunteer user groups. Gather feedback and refine configuration.
Phase 2: Expanded Pilot (Weeks 9-16)
Extend to additional applications and user populations. Focus on high-friction scenarios where new approach delivers obvious benefits. Continue VPN as fallback.
Phase 3: Production Migration (Weeks 17-28)
Systematically migrate user populations to new access methods. Communicate timeline clearly. Maintain VPN for legacy applications requiring network access.
Phase 4: VPN Sunset (Weeks 29-40)
Reduce VPN infrastructure as usage declines. Address remaining legacy dependencies. Eventually decommission VPN for standard user access, retaining only for specific edge cases if necessary.
Migration Timeline Overview:
Phase | Duration | Focus | VPN Status |
Parallel Deployment | 8 weeks | Infrastructure, pilot users | Primary access method |
Expanded Pilot | 8 weeks | Additional apps/users, feedback | Parallel with alternative |
Production Migration | 12 weeks | Systematic cutover | Fallback only |
VPN Sunset | 12 weeks | Legacy cleanup | Decommission |
Measuring Success
User Experience Metrics
Track improvements in employee experience:
Metric | Current State (Typical VPN) | Target State |
Average Connection Time | 30-45 seconds | <5 seconds or instant |
Daily Reconnections Required | 3-5 | 0-1 |
Help Desk Tickets (Monthly) | 15-25 per 100 users | <5 per 100 users |
User Satisfaction Score | 2.5-3.5 / 5 | 4.0+ / 5 |
Reported Workarounds | 40-60% of users | <10% of users |
Security Metrics
Ensure security posture improves alongside user experience:
Metric | Target |
Attack Surface Reduction | >80% fewer exposed services |
Mean Time to Detect Anomalous Access | <15 minutes |
Unauthorized Access Attempts Blocked | 100% |
Audit Trail Completeness | 100% of access events logged |
Policy Compliance Rate | >99% |
Operational Metrics
Validate operational improvements:
Metric | Current State | Target State |
Infrastructure Cost (per user/month) | $15-25 | $8-15 |
Administrative Time (monthly) | 40-60 hours | 10-20 hours |
Onboarding Time for New Users | 2-4 hours | 15-30 minutes |
Time to Revoke Access | 24-48 hours | <1 hour |
Addressing Common Concerns
“Our legacy applications require network access”
Some applications genuinely require network-level connectivity-typically older systems that can’t be fronted by modern authentication. For these cases:
- Maintain minimal VPN infrastructure specifically for legacy access
- Segment legacy applications from modern infrastructure
- Create a roadmap to modernize or retire these applications
- Consider application-specific secure access solutions
The goal isn’t to eliminate VPN overnight but to make it the exception rather than the rule.
“We just invested in new VPN infrastructure”
Sunk cost shouldn’t drive strategy. Calculate the ongoing costs of VPN friction and compare against the investment required for modernization. In most cases, the productivity gains alone justify transition within 18-24 months.
Additionally, VPN infrastructure can be repurposed or scaled down gradually rather than abandoned immediately.
“Users will complain about any change”
Users complain about the current state. The question is whether they’ll complain less after the change. Pilot programs with clear metrics demonstrate impact before broader rollout. When users experience genuinely better access, they become advocates for expansion.
“We’re not sure our security posture would be equivalent”
Modern ZTNA and reverse access architectures typically provide stronger security than VPN:
- Application-level access reduces blast radius
- Continuous verification catches compromised sessions
- Better visibility enables faster threat detection
- Eliminated lateral movement opportunities
The perception that VPN is more secure often stems from familiarity rather than analysis. Documented security improvements help stakeholders understand the actual risk comparison.
The Business Case
Building the ROI Model
Constructing a business case requires quantifying both costs and benefits:
Current State Costs (Annual):
- Productivity loss: $4.7M – $9.4M (scaled to organization size)
- Help desk support: $200K – $500K
- VPN infrastructure and licensing: $300K – $800K
- Security incident risk premium: Variable
Target State Investments:
- New access infrastructure: $200K – $600K (first year)
- Migration effort: $100K – $300K
- Training and change management: $50K – $150K
Target State Benefits:
- Productivity recovery: 60-80% of current loss
- Help desk reduction: 50-70% fewer tickets
- Infrastructure optimization: 30-50% cost reduction
- Security posture improvement: Reduced breach risk
For most organizations, the business case shows positive ROI within 12-18 months, with benefits accelerating as adoption increases.
Stakeholder Alignment
Different stakeholders care about different outcomes:
Stakeholder | Primary Concern | Key Message |
CFO | Cost and ROI | Productivity gains exceed investment |
CISO | Security posture | Modern architecture reduces risk |
CIO | Operational efficiency | Less infrastructure, less support burden |
HR/Employee Experience | Talent retention | Better tools, happier employees |
Business Unit Leaders | Productivity | Faster access to information, fewer delays |
Tailoring the message to each stakeholder’s priorities builds the coalition needed for approval and successful implementation.
Conclusion
VPN fatigue is real, measurable, and addressable. The technology that enabled remote work in the 1990s has become an obstacle to productivity in the 2020s. Employees don’t hate security-they hate friction that feels unnecessary when every other digital experience in their lives works seamlessly.
The path forward isn’t abandoning security for convenience. Modern access architectures-Zero Trust Network Access, reverse access models, software-defined perimeters-deliver better security than VPN while dramatically improving user experience. They provide application-level access instead of network access, continuous verification instead of one-time authentication, and cloud-native scalability instead of hardware bottlenecks.
Organizations that modernize remote access report:
- Dramatic reductions in help desk tickets
- Measurable productivity improvements
- Stronger security posture through better visibility and reduced attack surface
- Higher employee satisfaction scores
The question isn’t whether to move beyond VPN-the limitations are too significant to ignore indefinitely. The question is when and how. Organizations that act deliberately, pilot carefully, and migrate systematically will capture the benefits while managing transition risk.
Your employees are already telling you, through help desk tickets, workarounds, and frustration, that the current state isn’t working. The tools to fix it exist. The business case is clear. The only remaining question is whether you’ll address VPN fatigue proactively or continue paying its hidden costs.
