Concept: California’s tech startup Teleport has developed an identity-based infrastructure access management platform named Teleport Access Plane that provides companies with easy and secure access to their critical infrastructure. The startup claims that the new platform consolidates connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit into a single platform to improve security and agility.

Nature of Disruption: The platform consolidates all aspects of infrastructure access into a single platform for software engineers and the applications they write. By doing so it aims to reduce attack surface area, cut operational overhead, easily enforce compliance, and improve productivity. Teleport Access Plane replaces VPNs (virtual; private networks), shared credentials, and legacy privileged access management technologies to improve security and engineering productivity. It consists of five products including Server Access, Kubernetes Access, Application Access, Database Access, and Desktop Access. The platform assigns identities to all the hardware, software, and users that constitute a company’s stack, eliminating the requirement for passwords or private keys. It can secure communications based on certificates between machines including service accounts, servers, and custom code in apps. To protect against compromised credentials, the platform only allows certificate-based authentication by integrating with an identity manager such as GitHub, Google Apps, Okta, or Microsoft Active Directory. It logs record events, including authentication attempts, file transfers, network connections, and file system changes. The platform provides a web dashboard for configuration but requests for elevated permissions which can be approved ad hoc via chat tools including Slack and Mattermost.

Outlook: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations to adopt a remote working environment and the demand for tools and technologies that enable secure remote access is on the rise. Organizations are looking at technologies to provide secure remote access for their critical infrastructure. Teleport claims that the Teleport Access Plane platform enables easy and secure access to the critical infrastructure of the organizations for employees working remotely. In May 2022, Teleport raised $110 million in a Series C funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The startup aims to use the funding to recruit new talents to the team. Teleport’s clients include Elastic, Snowflake, VMware, and DoorDash.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk