Virtualization / VPN Options on Apple Silicon

Long story short, for work, I need to connect to a cisco VPN that doesn't allow any outside access to the internet, in order to access certain company resources. This is due to FEDRAMP regulations, apparently. To accomplish this, they have us use a VM to access those resources so we can use the host machine to access the rest of the internet.

Unfortunately due to some uninformed decisions, they assigned me an M1 mac to do my work, but as I have discovered, apple silicon has very poor virtualization options. You can run a tech preview version of windows 11, but it does not support signing into work accounts. You can run another instance of macos with parallels or UTM or vmware preview, but it's a mess -- there's no way to copy/paste between host and vm, and generally a bunch of other issues as a result of the lack of support for any host/guest tools.

I have tried many different options and come up short, so I thought the HN community might have an idea. I am able to connect to the VPN from my host machine, but that is prohibitive since I would basically have to connect/disconnect every time I want to access resources on the outside net.

Perhaps there is an option that does not require a whole VM, but I am not well versed enough in networking to know what that may be.

Perhaps my only option is going back to an Intel mac.