As employees worldwide have transitioned to working from home during the pandemic, many organizations have found that the VPN services they used to use to access corporate networks securely are unable to support their massive remote workforces.
For this reason, a number of companies have begun offering new remote access tools that aim to be more secure and faster than existing corporate VPNs. Twingate is one such company and it recently announced that its new VPN alternative is now available worldwide after three months of testing.
- We've put together a list of the best business VPN services
- Secure your entire network with one of the best VPN routers
- Also check out our roundup of the best antivirus software
Twingate was founded by Tony Huie, Alex Marshall and Lior Rozner and its team built their new VPN alternative by focusing on security and ease of management in the same way they did while building products at Dropbox and Microsoft. In the about page on its site, the founders explained what led them to begin building Twingate back in 2018, saying:
“We started building Twingate in 2018 to solve the challenges every company faces around securing remote access. Although almost every technology evolved over the preceding 15 years and moved to the cloud - and although the way that people work has also changed - we were amazed to learn that remote access was still overwhelmingly provided via VPNs, a technology that has been largely unchanged since the 1990s. We discovered the reason for this was that organizations felt that complex migration paths and lack of ease of use were intimidating barriers to adopting a better, more secure approach.”
Twingate
Twingate was built from the ground up to support today's work from anywhere world and the new solution enables companies to secure their critical resources while offering a seamless experience for remote workers with simple management for IT admins. In fact, Twingate can be deployed in less than 15 minutes.
Twingate offers a number of benefits for end users including a mesh network overlay that gives them direct access to the information and applications they need, smart tunneling which 'auto-segregates' traffic, patented network congestion optimization technology and a 'Dropbox-style' experience that runs in the background and requires minimal user interaction.
On the security front, the solution supports zero trust, multiple cryptographic security checks per connection and network cloaking. Twingate also integrates with major identity providers such as Okta, Google and Microsoft to provide secure access.
In terms of pricing, Twingate offers both a free Starter plan as well as plans for Teams, Business and Enterprise.
The Starter plan allows for up to two users to use the service on two devices each and they can set up one remote network. The company's Teams plan costs $5 per user per month and allows for up to 50 users, five devices per user and five remote networks. Twingate's Business plan raises the number of users to 150 and allows for 10 remote networks as well as resource-level access control for $10 per user per month. Twingate also offers an Enterprise plan with no user or device limits and more advanced features but you will need to contact the company for a quote.
- We've also highlighted the best VPN services
