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Tag: Teleport

  • Teleport Assist Leverages Generative AI to Democratize DevOps

    Teleport Assist Leverages Generative AI to Democratize DevOps

    Teleport has made available a chat interface, dubbed Teleport Assist, that makes use of OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable DevOps teams to troubleshoot infrastructure issues more easily.

    Using the natural language interface (NLI) provided by Teleport Assist, DevOps engineers can ask questions and give instructions in English to massive fleets of servers. Capabilities include being able to suggest commands and scripts for debugging and resolving common issues and then generating commands for review before they are applied.

    In future versions of Teleport Assist, support for other cloud resources, such as SQL databases and Kubernetes clusters, will be added. Teleport Assist currently supports Secure Shell (SSH) and bash scripts, with support for additional languages and interfaces to be added over time.

    Teleport CEO Ev Kontsevoy said it’s already clear that many of the scripts that DevOps engineers rely on today for IT management will be replaced by generative AI platforms. The average IT administrator will be able to invoke DevOps platforms via an NLI that eliminates the need for extensive programming expertise, he added.

    In effect, the NLI surfaced by generative AI platforms will serve to democratize DevOps expertise, Kontsevoy noted.

    It’s still early days as far as the adoption of generative AI by DevOps engineers is concerned, but it’s already apparent that its impact will be profound. It will increase the pace at which applications are built while making it easier for software engineers to manage large codebases. Most of the generative AI advances thus far improve developer productivity, but tools such as Teleport Assist show how generative AI will also make it easier for more organizations to adopt DevOps best practices that previously were limited to organizations that could afford to hire and retain significant numbers of software engineers.

    At their core, generative AI platforms are fundamentally changing the way humans interact with machines. Instead of requiring a developer or engineer to create a level of abstraction to communicate with a machine, it’s now possible for machines to understand the language humans use to communicate with each other. A a natural language interface will soon enable DevOps engineers to ask generative AI platforms to not only surface suggestions but also debug applications and even write code. The accuracy and quality of those results will vary depending on how the large language models (LLMs) that trained those platforms were, but over time there will be a wide range of LLMs that are trained to be used within specific domains such as DevOps.

    The issue is determining how to organize DevOps teams as more tasks become automated. Generative AI doesn’t replace the need for IT professionals, but it does make it simpler to manage IT at unprecedented levels of scale. In fact, at this point, the proverbial generative AI genie is out of the bottle, so there is no going back. The only thing left to decide is how quickly generative AI becomes pervasively applied.

  • Teleport Raises $110 Million Series C at $1.1 Billion Valuation Led by Bessemer Venture Partners with Participation from New Investor Insight Partners

    Funding follows dramatic revenue growth as identity-based access requirements skyrocket

    Oakland, CA, May 3, 2022 – Teleport, the leading provider of Identity-based Infrastructure Access Management, today announced it has raised $110 million in Series C funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Insight Partners and existing investors Kleiner Perkins and S28 Capital. This investment brings Teleport’s total funding raised to $169 million at a current valuation of $1.1 billion, and comes after the company nearly tripled its revenue and doubled its customer base from 2020 to 2021.

    As a part of the investment, Bessemer Venture Partners’ Mary D’Onofrio will take a seat on Teleport’s board, and Insight Partners’ Matt Koran will be a board observer. In August 2021, Teleport announced its $30 million Series B round led by S28 Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

    “Growing complexity of modern cloud environments has led to a situation where managing secure access to infrastructure begins to break, as evidenced by increased frequency and severity of breaches.,” said Ev Kontsevoy, co-founder and CEO, Teleport. “Our customers are forward thinking organizations that are scaling quickly. They realized that the right way to scale access is consolidation across all protocols and environments. Our platform, the open-source Teleport Access Plane, addresses these challenges by giving every engineer, every piece of hardware and every application an identity. With identity based access for everyone and everything, more security threats are neutralized and the impact of breaches is dramatically reduced without impacting developer productivity.”

    As organizations deal with complexity because of shifts to the cloud, modernization of IT stack and growth of mixed infrastructure environments, Teleport’s open-source Access Plane technology consolidates the four essential capabilities every security-conscious organization needs: connectivity, authentication, authorization and audit. By providing the only cloud-native, identity-based infrastructure access solution for humans and machines, Teleport eliminates network perimeter security issues, reduces attack surface area, cuts operational overhead, enforces security & compliance, and improves developer productivity, all at once.

    With this latest funding, Teleport will expand its go-to-market organization to serve its fast-growing, global customer base. Teleport will also bolster its R&D organization to solve the most complex security challenges faced by organizations of all sizes.

    “Now, more than ever, is the time to make it easy for any company to employ world class security practices as global cyber attacks become more and more sophisticated,” said Mary D’Onofrio, partner and co-founder of growth investment practice, Bessemer Venture Partners. “With Teleport, security becomes stronger *and* simpler for both humans and machines, making it possible to deploy and enforce security and compliance best-practices throughout all organizations. We’re excited to lead this round and I am looking forward to working closely with Ev and his team to offer elegant cybersecurity solutions to a growing customer base of household names.”

    Customers including Doordash, Elastic, Nasdaq, Snowflake and others use Teleport to secure digital infrastructure access for remote and hybrid workforces and combat the ever-increasing cyber threats.

    “Speed is key to our business. But so is security,” said Luke Christopherson, Software Engineer at Doordash. “The Teleport Access Plane allows our engineers to securely access the infrastructure they need to do their jobs without getting in the way of productivity. Everybody wins.”

    Teleport recently announced Teleport 9, the latest edition of the open-source Teleport Access Plane. This release introduced Teleport Machine ID which delivers identity-based access and audit capabilities for resources including servers and databases, CI/CD automation, service accounts and custom code in applications such as microservices. Teleport 9 also included Teleport Connect, a secure, developer-friendly browser for cloud infrastructure. The browser solves the issues posed by terminals optimized for local environments when a majority of development now happens in the cloud.

    Steven Dickens, Senior Analyst, Futurum Research commented, “As digital transformation takes hold from the core to the edge, security becomes more critical. The team at Teleport are focused on delivering cloud-native, identity-based infrastructure access solutions for both humans and machines. The announcement today take the company one step closer to its mission of eliminating the need for secrets when accessing infrastructure, and as a result delivering both simpler, stronger identity-based authentication.”

    To learn more about Teleport and today’s news, visit the company’s website or most recent blog about the funding.

    About Teleport
    Teleport, leading provider of Identity-based Infrastructure Access Management, consolidates the four essential infrastructure access capabilities every security-conscious organization needs: connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit. Teleport’s unique approach is not only more secure but also improves developer productivity. Teleport is used by leading companies including Elastic, Snowflake, Doordash, and NASDAQ. The company is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and S28 Capital. Headquartered in Oakland, California, the company embraces a remote-first work culture.

    About Bessemer Venture Partners
    Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 135 IPOs and 200 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio includes Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr and Toast and has $9 billion of capital under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Boston, Beijing and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).

  • Teleport Adds Database Support to Security Gateway

    Teleport Adds Database Support to Security Gateway

    Teleport announced today it has added support for databases to a security gateway, delivered as a cloud service, that is currently used to secure Linux servers and Kubernetes clusters.

    Ev Kontsevoy, CEO, said Teleport intends to extend the reach of the security gateway up the entire stack of IT infrastructure that developers routinely use to remotely access databases. Initially, Teleport 6.0 adds support for open source PostgreSQL and MySQL databases.

    Teleport has gained traction as an access management tool because it provides a single binary that can be easily deployed by developers to encrypt IT platforms and enforce session controls. It automatically discovers all the resources in an IT environment, along with the protocols needed to access them. Teleport also provides a unified audit log, in a JSON format, that enables IT teams to track what resources are being accessed, when and by whom.

    Other features include the ability to authenticate identities via built-in single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor capabilities, discover and see all database instances, integrate with command line interfaces (CLIs) and a set of workflows for managing privilege escalation.

    Access control is becoming a bigger issue due to a number of factors. The overall IT environment is becoming more complex as the infrastructure stack required to run applications continues to grow; most IT teams continue to work from home to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Teleport provides a fine-grained approach to streamlining access management across servers, clusters and databases in a way that eliminates the need to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs). In effect, Teleport enables IT teams to move toward a more identity-centric approach to unifying the management of access, Kontsevoy said.

    That’s critical at a time when the rise of DevSecOps is pushing responsibility for security further left toward developers, Kontsevoy added. While the rate at which that transition occurs will vary widely, Kontsevoy said it’s clear developers are taking more control over access control as part of a broader effort to roll out secure applications, faster.

    It may be a while before DevOps teams are able to aggregate all the access control protocols they currently employ under a single proxy. However, Kontsevoy said, the massive amount of time and effort spent managing access control today will drive DevOps teams to look for ways to automate what is currently a very manual process.

    Less clear is what role cybersecurity teams might play in supervising access management. The days when a separate overlay was needed to manage access may be coming to a close.

    In the meantime, it’s clear VPNs were not designed to address access management, in an era where the bulk of IT teams – and the employees they support – are working from home. More employees may be soon be heading back to the office more frequently, but it’s likely that remote work will remain prevalent. That means legacy approaches to managing remote access that were never designed to scale will becoming increasingly obsolete.

  • Practice Safe SSH with Teleport

    Practice Safe SSH with Teleport

    Decentralized Key Management and Sharing Is Not The Answer ­­ Practice Safe SSH with Teleport

    View PostAll projects start off with the best intentions, user management and security around accounts won’t be an afterthought. Despite those intentions, the requirements to move fast tend to override things suchDecentralized Key Management and Sharing Is Not The Answer ­­ Practice Safe SSH with Teleport All projects start off with the best intentions, user management and security around accounts won’t be an afterthought. Despite those intentions, the requirements to move fast tend to override things such as account hygiene, and before you know it, you are trying to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of SSH keys and privileged accounts either manually or with a tool that wasn’t designed for key management. You also probably need to keep track of authorization privileges, and a shared document or spreadsheet is not the correct method, especially when you have systems that need to be PCI compliant or are in SOX scope.

    Centralized Key Management

    Does your current SSH key management strategy feel like this? Are you using manual methods to distribute and manage SSH public keys? As the number of hosts and users increase, this method becomes more and more unwieldy and also can present you with security and compliance risks. By moving to a centralized approach with Conjur’s Teleport open­ source solution, you are now able to benefit from the following: ● No more SSH key sharing between developers ● Each developer has their own unique login, with their own distinct set of privileges ● Simple SSH key creation and deletion

    User Management

    A proper strategy for programmatic provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts is equally as important as SSH key management. In addition to SSH key management, Teleport also provides an LDAP service that allows for a customized list of users/groups that can be associated with specific projects and environments. When a new developer joins a project, you can quickly programmatically provision the account and access rights, and when a developer departs, you can revoke the rights as well as remove the SSH key.

    SSH Key Rotation

    Scheduled SSH Key rotation should also be part of the overall security strategy and posture, and for those systems that need to be PCI DSS compliant, SSH keys need to be rotated annually. By providing a centralized SSH key solution, Teleport allows you to seamlessly rotate the keys, as well as keep a detailed audit log around which key was rotated when.

    Conclusion

    SSH is a powerful tool that provides a great deal of value and security for your developers, but with that great power comes great responsibility. Teleport is a tool that allows you to provide that power to your developers while also knowing that you are practicing safe SSH and are being secure and responsible.as account hygiene, and before you know it, you are trying to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of SSH keys and privileged accounts either manually or with a tool that wasn’t designed for key management. You also probably need to keep track of authorization privileges, and a shared document or spreadsheet is not the correct method, especially when you have systems that need to be PCI compliant or are in SOX scope.

    About the Author/Mike Kail

    mike_kailMike Kail was Yahoo’s CIO and SVP of Infrastructure, where he led the IT and Data Center functions for the company. He has more than 24 years of IT Operations experience with a focus on highly scalable architectures, prior to joining Yahoo. Most recently, Kail served as VP of IT Operations at Netflix. Prior to that, he was VP of IT Operations at Attensity, where he was responsible for the Americas data center operations team; including managing various big data systems with their Hadoop cluster, HBase, and MongoDB components. He has been recognized widely for his insightful industry commentary on Twitter, and was recently named by the Huffington Post as one of the “Top 100 Most Social CIOs on Twitter.” He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University. Reach out to him on Twitter or LinkedIn.