Your SSH bastion is not your friend.

It slows your team, adds friction, and still leaves gaps that attackers can slip through. The old bastion host model was built for a world before zero trust, before cloud-native sprawl, before engineers juggled dozens of environments and identities a day. The truth: bastions are brittle. It’s time to replace them with role-based access control that works everywhere, instantly.

A bastion host forces all access through a single choke point, but once inside, permissions are often too broad. That’s the opposite of least privilege. With modern Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), access is granted only at the level a role truly needs—no more, no less. Every connection is logged, auditable, and bound to identity. Every secret can expire on schedule. And every permission can be granted or revoked on demand without manual key management.

Replacing a bastion host with RBAC isn’t only about security. It’s about speed. No more SSH key distribution chaos. No more VPN lock-ins. No more “I’ll just share my creds for a sec.” Teams move faster when authentication and authorization happen automatically—when a developer’s role defines exactly what they can reach without asking and without waiting.

RBAC for infrastructure works through policy-driven, identity-aware gateways that can enforce context: who you are, what you’re doing, where you’re doing it from, and when. Integrations tie into your cloud providers, CI/CD pipelines, identity providers, and audit systems. You get fine-grained, centralized control over SSH, Kubernetes, databases, and internal web apps. You can enforce multi-factor authentication every time. You can see real-time access logs without logging into yet another system.

The migration away from bastion hosts is already happening. Forward-looking teams are swapping SSH gateways for policy engines. They’re deleting static keys. They’re removing hardcoded credentials from code repos. They’re banning shared accounts. They’re using short-lived certificates tied to specific roles and workflows. This is the secure access pattern for the cloud era.

You don’t have to rebuild your access stack from scratch to get there. With the right platform, you can turn RBAC into your single access layer—replacing your bastion while plugging into everything else you already use. And you can do it without scripting your own brittle glue code.

Stop patching the old model. Replace it. Secure more, configure less, and give your people the freedom to work without waiting on gates.

See RBAC-powered bastion host replacement live in minutes at hoop.dev.