Glossary / VPN (Virtual Private Network)
VPN (Virtual Private Network)
An encrypted tunnel that routes a device's traffic through a private network path, historically used to grant remote access to internal resources as if the device were physically on the local network.
A VPN encrypts traffic between a client device and a gateway, effectively extending the "trusted internal network" out to wherever that device happens to be — a coffee shop, a home office, another country — so a remote employee can reach internal resources the same way they would sitting at their desk.
The architectural problem is implicit trust: once connected, a traditional VPN typically grants network-level access, not access scoped to one specific resource. A compromised VPN credential can hand an attacker a foothold to move laterally across whatever the network segment exposes, not just the one application the user actually needed.
That specific weakness is what Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) architectures were built to replace — instead of "on the network, trusted," every request to every resource gets verified individually regardless of network location, which is a meaningfully different security posture than a VPN alone provides, especially for third-party or vendor access into an environment.
How Nexus handles this
Nexus's own RMM agent skips the VPN model for its management channel entirely — it's outbound-only, so there's no inbound tunnel or open port for an attacker to target in the first place, and every job that runs is cryptographically signed rather than trusted because it arrived from an already-connected network.
More terms
MSP (Managed Service Provider)
A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems on an ongoing, proactive basis — usually a flat-fee contract, not break-fix billing.
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)
Software that lets an MSP monitor device health and perform remote management tasks — patching, scripting, remote control — across every client site from one console.
PSA (Professional Services Automation)
Software that runs the business side of MSP operations — ticketing, SLAs, billing, contracts, and client records — the system of record most MSP work flows through.
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