HashiCorp announced the general availability of HCP Boundary at its HashiConf conference. The solution should provide secure remote access.
Boundary expands HashiCorp’s zero trust offering. The product will sit alongside HCP Vault and HCP Consul. For HashiCorp, zero trust means using identities to secure applications, networks and individuals across multiple clouds, on-premises and hybrid environments. It should reduce the attack surface and automate complex security workflows. Organizations are assured that people, machines and services are authenticated, every action is authorized and data is protected.
HCP Boundary
HCP Boundary builds on this philosophy by providing a secure remote access solution for cloud operating models. To this end, HashiCorp promises enhancements of existing software-defined perimeter solutions, such as VPNs and privileged access management tools. In HashiCorp’s eyes, these solutions often require a lot of manual work. To address this, HCP Boundary provides tight authentication and authorization mechanisms. There are also options for rapid onboarding of users and automated workflows for discovery and credential management.
Teams and users can access critical systems with HCP Boundary. Meanwhile, session connectivity and the provisioning of login credentials are guaranteed. Boundary allows operations and security teams to bring in cloud service catalogs and on-premises resources. They can use policies to determine who can access which systems, users and groups. For this purpose, HashiCorp uses Vault, which helps establish passwordless connections. As a result, critical data such as login credentials are protected from external users.
Intelligence, roles, visibility and service discovery
In addition to its core capabilities for secure remote access, Boundary offers integrations with identity platforms. These include Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Okta, two of the most popular solutions in this area. Furthermore, OpenID Connect support allows other identity platforms to be connected and used to onboard trusted identities.
HashiCorp also offers automated service discovery for streamlined discovery and configuration. Dynamic host catalogs are available with Azure and AWS. Additionally, there’s a direct HashiCorp Terraform integration for resource retrieval. Finally, Boundary’s session visibility and logging options are noteworthy. These give businesses insights into session statistics, events and logs. Users have the ability to transfer data to business intelligence and event monitoring tools.
Boundary is available immediately as a managed HCP service and an open-source version.
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