• Secure remote access today is tedious • Most VPN and privileged access management (PAM) tools are a huge burden because they force users - especially engineers - to change how they work • The remote access landscape is cluttered with proprietary clients and web-based proxies • If a developer wants to SSH into a production server or access a database, they usually have to: Stop their actual work Launch a VPN Log in to a web portal Search for a “safe”/target account (with many of the incumbent PAM players, end-users have to jump through these hoops today) Check out a password, copy it to their clipboard and then paste it into their client or go with credential injection where supported by vendor Security is maintained, but productivity is sacrificed • This friction - the context switching required to navigate security tools before doing actual work - is what we call the “portal tax” • This is the hidden cost built into much of the current security tooling landscape

Article Summaries:

  • Secure remote access today is tedious. Most VPN and privileged access management (PAM) tools are a huge burden because they force users - especially engineers - to change how they work. The remote access landscape is cluttered with proprietary clients and web-based proxies. If a developer wants to SSH into a production server or access a database, they usually have to: Stop their actual work Launch a VPN Log in to a web portal Search for a “safe”/target account (with many of the incumbent PAM players, end-users have to jump through these hoops today) Check out a password, copy it to their clip

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