Public sector Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and IT leaders are caught in a tug-of-war over where and how government employees work. 

\r\n While return-to-office directives aim to bring federal employees back into physical offices, 2026 arbitration rulings across major civilian agencies — including the IRS, US Forest Service, Social Security Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services — have restored telework and remote work flexibilities for hundreds of thousands of personnel. Combined with ongoing state, local, and education (SLED) hybrid work policies, remote work remains a reality across the public sector.

\r\n Regardless of whether an employee is sitting at a desk in a federal facility or working from a home office, public sector agencies face a shared operational wall: the legacy VPN and its static encrypted tunnels.

\r\n Initially engineered for a network-centric world, traditional hardware VPNs have become a major security concern for agencies that are trying to…