Twingate
Ensuring Zero Trust Security for Online Workforces

The COVID-19 pandemic has impelled businesses to review their existing technologies and means to offer remote workers access to IT resources. The workplace has become decentralized, the office has moved to the coffee shop, and work-from-home is commonplace. This change has made it clear that solutions based on virtual private networks (VPN) no longer meet the demands of a remote workforce at large, ultimately leading to poor end-user and administrative experiences. These VPN solutions are complicated, limit network performance and are difficult to manage. Moreover, cybercriminals and hackers frequently target VPN gateways since they expose a simple public address. There is a need to leverage better solutions to solve new security challenges and enhance security by verifying identity, IP address, and device posture. Consequently, to face the new reality of the business world, companies are adopting zero-trust solutions—a security approach where every user and connection is verified before accessing IT resources. This new approach needs to enable businesses to easily secure resources to trusted individuals without the complexity, performance degradation of implementing complicated VPN solutions or being limited by network infrastructure in assigning resource access rights.

To this end, Twingate helps organizations rapidly implement zero-trust networking to secure and manage access to their internal resources and SaaS applications in the new era of the hybrid and remote workplace. The company was founded in 2019 with an aim to address the challenges that IT, Security, and DevOps teams face while supporting their remote employees. “Most companies today still rely on VPN due to the complexity involved in implementing a better, more secure solution. We saw an opportunity to offer a solution that is easy to implement and top-notch from a usability, maintainability, and reliability perspective,” says Alex Marshall, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Twingate.

Change management has never been an easy process as employees are often reluctant to adopt new technology quickly even though it improves business operations. That is why Twingate offers enterprise-grade services with consumer-grade usability for both IT administrators and end-users, accelerating the adoption of this technology. “We aim to foster change by providing human-centric security solutions. Our product doesn’t add friction to employees’ lives while it secures company resources,” says Marshall. “That’s why when companies roll out Twingate internally, employees happily adopt the product.”

We envision Twingate as the default security product that companies can roll out without an IT team or complex infrastructure requirements

Twingate spends a large amount of time making the deployment of its product easy. As a result of these efforts, the product can be deployed in minutes providing secure access to the workforce. “Due to its flexible nature, our product works across various platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem as well,” adds Marshall. Additionally, employees can set it up themselves, in contrast to VPNs that require IT personnel for implementation. Moreover, employees can easily download Twingate from any app store and then sign in with regular corporate credentials. If an organization uses an identity provider such as Okta, OneLogin, or Azure ID, then Twingate hooks into clients’ regular corporate systems. As Twingate is an out-of the box solution without any requirement for network configuration changes, it easily integrates with existing systems and ingests identity-related credentials automatically into its centralized solution. The client can quickly implement Twingate without changing or managing configuration on employees’ devices as all mandates are established through an admin console. “One key principle of zero trust implementation is ensuring least privileged access to make sure users only have access to data or systems they need to complete their work,” says Marshall.

To put things into perspective, Twingate provided a gaming studio customer with point-to-point connectivity to reduce the load on the office network due to hairpinning. As a result, employees could access information more directly rather than connecting through a central VPN server—ultimately improving network performance. With several such successes, Twingate is today witnessing increasing demand for its product as companies look to replace their legacy VPN technology. The company also plans to expand its product into monitoring network traffic indepth to help IT teams implement access controls to address real-time threats. “We envision Twingate as the default security product that companies can roll out without an IT team or complex infrastructure requirements,” concludes Marshall.