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Gravitational today announced it has changed its name to Teleport and launched the Teleport Unified Access Plane, an open source security gateway that comes in the form of a single binary that acts as a proxy for remotely accessing Linux servers and Kubernetes clusters.
Teleport Unified Access Plane (UAP) for managing those gateways can be either deployed by an IT team or accessed via a cloud service managed by Teleport.
Offerings included in Teleport UAP are Teleport Server Access, Teleport Kubernetes Access and Teleport Application Access, which combined enable IT organizations to lock down access to an IT environment.
Company CEO Ev Kontsevoy said Teleport UAP gives engineers via a single login access to just the IT resources they have permission to access. That approach reduces the myriad credentials that IT organizations currently need to manage across multiple networks.
Teleport automatically discovers all the resources in an IT environment along with the protocols needed to access them. It provides a unified audit log in a JSON format that enables IT teams to track what resources are being accessed when and by whom.
Access control is becoming a bigger issue because the overall IT environment is becoming more complex as the infrastructure stack required to run applications grows. Teleport provides a way to streamline access management across servers, clusters and databases.
That issue is also becoming a bigger challenge with IT personnel now working from home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, added Kontsevoy.
That fine-grained approach to access will ultimately eliminate the need to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) at a time when the network perimeter continues to dissolve. In effect, Teleport enables IT teams to move toward a more identity-centric approach to unifying the management of access, he said.
In general, he noted, Teleport enables organizations to manage security as code rather than having to rely on separate overlays. As such, they can shift responsibility further left toward DevOps teams.
It may take some time for IT teams to aggregate all the access control protocols they currently employ under a single proxy. However, Kontevoy said, the massive amount of time and effort spent managing access control today will drive organizations that have embraced best DevOps practices to look for ways to automate what today is a very manual process.
The challenge, of course, is finding the time to achieve that goal. Teleport is betting a single binary in combination with a control plane accessed primarily as a managed service will make it too simple for DevOps teams to ignore. Regardless of approach, however, it’s clear there needs to be a better way to manage access within the sea of servers, databases and applications that now make up the typical IT environment.
