How Opal and Twingate Support Blend

Featuring:

• Paul Guthrie - Information Security Officer
• ‍ Matthew Jackson - Security Operations and Architecture Manager

Paul Guthrie:

Well, I joined Blend when it was, I think about 400 people. Matt, how many people when you joined?

Matthew Jackson:

About a hundred I'd say.

Paul Guthrie:

Yeah. So when you're a hundred people, the security team knows, does person A need access to application B and you can make those decisions. As you grow past about 3-400 people, we start getting into situations where somebody says, I need access to X and we've never heard of this employee, nor have we heard of this application that they're requesting access to. And so we can't make a good informed decision. I think the major pain point, which was really on the IT support teams, is that access was being granted. The IT support teams would have to essentially go and ask somebody, Can I have approval to add this user to your particular resource. It was a very manual and expensive process, because it's manual process subject to error.

Matthew Jackson:

It's a pretty tangible pain point that we did have before Twingate and Opal working in tandem. It was the fact that we did have multiple VPNs, of multiple different architectures depending on their need, which would then cause a situation where people have to log in to see what they need it for A, then log in toVPN two to get to B and then back and forth, back and forth. It's a terrible user experience, right?

Paul Guthrie:

What Twingate allows us to do both internally, and externally within our network, is it allows us to tie together logical access and network access. So if you don't have logical access, you also don't have network access. And if you do have network access, you should also have logical access and actually be able to log in. And so it's essentially, it's zero trust because the default state is no one has access to anything. We firmly believe that you cannot scale a security program without automating. And this is where our involvement with both Twingate and Opal comes in, Opal allows us to provision and Twingate allows us to tie what we've provisioned logically to network access. And so, that really enables us to have these flows where access really is fully automated.

About Opal

Opal is the unified identity platform for modern enterprises. Opal aggregates identity and access data to provide visibility and defense-in-depth infrastructure for mission-critical systems. Enterprises can discover anomalous identity risks with the product and remediate them in minutes. The world's best companies trust Opal to govern and adapt sensitive access.

Want to see it yourself? Contact sales@opal.dev or book a meeting here for a personalized demo.

About Twingate:

Twingate provides a secure access platform that replaces VPNs with a modern Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution that combines enterprise-grade security with a consumer-grade user experience. It can be set up in less than 15 minutes and integrates with all major cloud providers and identity providers. Twingate helps companies move towards a Zero Trust architecture by tying every network event to an identity—user, device, and service—giving businesses modern control and visibility over activity across their entire network.

This year Twingate raised $42M in Series B financing led by BOND and existing investors at WndrCo, 8VC, and SignalFire.  Read more about CEO Tony Huie’s vision for Twingate in this blog post: Solving the usability problem to unlock Zero Trust adoption.