Thoughts on Twingate?

[Sveeno]

Hello friends,

 

I wanted to get a quick temperature check on a brand that reached out for sponsorship called Twingate:

https://www.twingate.com/

 

This area is not my expertise, but from what I understand, it looks like they provide a service to implement ZeroTrust Network Access within businesses.

 

Let me know what y'all think!

[manikyath]

this sounds like the kind of product that made me feel excessively tired about the way IT management is headed... it's buzzwords, it's vague, and it seems extremely unnecessary.

 

now.. none of this is actually detracting from if someone has a usecase for this... but to me at least this sounds like a solution looking for a problem, using shallow marketing to sell it.

 

having that said... this rant is equally valid for:

- every VPN sponsor

- stuff like glasswire

- those "protect your data" services that charge money essentially to automate 'delete my data' requests.

- ...

 

and honestly... the only thing about such sponsors that annoys me, is the people seeing a new sponsor, believe this enterprise technology is targeted at them, and then come to the forum believing they need some enterprise firewall to make sure their ISP doesnt spy on their facebook.

 

if they pay the bills, i prefer a boring corporate sponsor read of buzzwords over raid shadow legends.

[Oshino Shinobu]

8 minutes ago, manikyath said:

this sounds like the kind of product that made me feel excessively tired about the way IT management is headed... it's buzzwords, it's vague, and it seems extremely unnecessary.

 

now.. none of this is actually detracting from if someone has a usecase for this... but to me at least this sounds like a solution looking for a problem, using shallow marketing to sell it.

 

having that said... this rant is equally valid for:

- every VPN sponsor

- stuff like glasswire

- those "protect your data" services that charge money essentially to automate 'delete my data' requests.

- ...

 

and honestly... the only thing about such sponsors that annoys me, is the people seeing a new sponsor, believe this enterprise technology is targeted at them, and then come to the forum believing they need some enterprise firewall to make sure their ISP doesnt spy on their facebook.

 

if they pay the bills, i prefer a boring corporate sponsor read of buzzwords over raid shadow legends.

Definitely agree on the buzzwords and vagueness.

 

It keeps saying ditch your VPNs, but the product they offer is essentially a well configured VPN, using Zero Trust principles offered via authentication providers and strict ACLs, along with application permissions. It's still using TLS tunnels between the client and a server (Connector). Despite all the talk of "ditching your VPN", the underlying technology is essentially still a VPN.

 

Not saying it's disingenous, but it is overselling itself if you ask me. As far as I can see, there's nothing it offers over our exisitng configuration with an SSL VPN, with split tunneling, authentication and conditional access policies, then ACLs and filtering to control access once authenticated. All of this is doable with existing VPN options, as essentially it is just a VPN underneath it.

 

EDIT: Also, agree on that last point. If you do take them on as a sponsor, @Sveeno, I'd hope that it's made clear this is a business/enterprise solution for secure remote access. To a lot of people "VPN" is something that masks your location or provides a level of security for accessing the internet, rather than a tool used in corporate networks, so I could easily see people thinking this is the next best thing for their personal use rather than their exisitng personal VPN.

[NovaNightmare]

This looks fine and makes sense. You (LMG) constantly advertise Zoho which is a company aimed at businesses and not regular consumers. This is in the same vein, whether people understand what these terms mean or not, it's not for them. If you know what Zero Trust means, and the principle of least privilege (something that would have mitigated the recent hack on LMG) then this would interest you.

 

So as a person who deals with security in this area and knows what all of this is and is about I don't see anything wrong with it or the terms.

 

Additional thought -

 

The only issue is that for businesses I think it's pretty common we deal in years. Solutions that are contracted over a minimum of 1 year or more, so even if this is a good product, I'd not change solutions (if I wanted to) unless this hit at the right time or I heard about it a few times leading up to whether we wanted to maintain what we have or change things up. So perhaps if LMG is going to talk about security more, a "Sponsored" video that did a dive into the product and how it worked (working remote, etc, etc) would be beneficial. 

[Hollidayyc]

I've been trialing Twingate and a few of their competitors in my corporate environment. So far happy with what I have seen from them. It's definitely a business focused product but I don't see any issue with that - I can't comment on their term commitments yet but from their site it does look like we have the option of month to month. The free tier should be more than enough for anyone looking for basic home/lab use. 

 

I can try to answer questions based on what I've seen in my trial if anyone has any.

 

For whatever its worth the others we are trialing are: Tempered networks, Zscaler, Tailscale, and Twingate.