Governing Third-Party Privileged Access: Moving Beyond VPN-Based Collaboration

Warwick Ashford

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Organizations rely on third parties that require remote access to internal systems and operational platforms. Managing this privileged third-party access creates operational and security challenges, particularly when external identities fall outside established governance processes. Many enterprises still rely on Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity and manual provisioning, which introduces delays, administrative overhead, and security exposure while limiting visibility and accountability. This whitepaper examines these challenges and outlines the need for a governance model that manages external identities and enforces accountability, while showing how Fudo ShareAccess enables controlled, auditable third-party access without relying on VPN-based connectivity.

Organizations increasingly rely on extended ecosystems of suppliers, contractors, service providers, and technology partners that require privileged access to enterprise systems. Traditional third-party access approaches—largely built on VPNs and manual provisioning—create operational delays and expand risk by granting broad network connectivity instead of tightly scoped access to specific resources. Friction in onboarding and approvals can lead to insecure workarounds such as shared vendor accounts, undermining accountability and making it difficult to determine who did what, when, and whether access should have expired. Offboarding is similarly risky because manual deprovisioning across multiple systems often leaves vendor accounts active long after engagements end.

As supplier ecosystems scale to dozens or hundreds of partners, complexity grows for both enterprises and vendors, who must maintain many VPN configurations and credentials. Although modern VPNs add MFA and conditional access, they still tend to expose network segments in ways that conflict with least-privilege requirements. Regulatory expectations reinforce the need for stronger oversight, including unique identities, strong authentication, monitoring, and detailed records of external activity.

To address these challenges, the paper proposes identity-centric, session-based governance models that combine identity governance, privileged session management, and continuous monitoring. It frames this approach through complementary Identity Fabric and Security Fabric architectures that unify policy definition, distributed enforcement, and correlated visibility across tools.

Fudo ShareAccess, built on Fudo Enterprise PAM, is presented as a platform for controlled, auditable third-party privileged access without VPNs. It uses reverse SSH tunnels from the enterprise outward, delegates vendor user administration via separate tenants, injects vaulted credentials into monitored sessions, supports multiple protocols, and applies cryptographic controls, MFA, and time-bound approvals to enable rapid yet governed vendor access.