As a solution architect at Teleport, I help potential customers get up and running with Teleport, but I am also a power user myself. In my time here, I have picked a few favorite features to help me be more efficient using Teleport, but they aren’t as widely known as they should be. This article hopes to change that and give some love to three little-known features that can enhance your usage of Teleport. I use them every day and hope that after reading this blog, you will too.

Use of misused or stolen credentials is the number one cause of data breaches. Using Password123 is worthy of a good laugh, but there are other passwords that are used everyday: SSH keys and other tokens used to access critical infrastructure. Teleport recently commissioned a survey of 1000 IT, DevOps and Security professionals and found that passwords are the number one way of managing access to infrastructure.

Most car purchases start with a test drive. Increasingly, enterprise software purchases (including security software) are made the same way. These evaluations are often called a Proof of Concept or PoC. This term is a great fit for lots of situations, especially when the solution evolves a novel way of combining established tools or a hard-to-define use case that can only be judged in practice.

I am writing this from my home office in Texas. Texas isn’t just my home. It is the home of the best brisket on the planet, some of the most iconic high tech brands in the world, and energy production that powers the global economy. In the morning, I might meet with one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the country about achieving the rigorous FedRAMP certification so they can sell to federal agencies.

Ding. That is the sound of the elevator opening on the ground floor of the One WTC building in New York. We’re both there for a meeting. You, as Director of Systems Engineering for a Financial Services provider, are presenting your plans to shore up the hybrid infrastructure used to run the bank’s new crypto-based services. I’m meeting with clients who are trying to rebuild their reputation, and SOC2 certification, after a data breach.

As part of Teleport 8 we’ve made significant improvements to our routing, so much so the improvements have become a feature. Teleport 8 has new TLS routing that greatly reducing the port requirements needed for Teleport to run. Reducing the open network footprint down to a single port for your entire infrastructure and minimizing the attack surface. Want to know how we did it? Read on!

During my time as a penetration tester, I’ve seen many IT teams storing server catalogs with respective IP addresses and passwords in a sharable Excel sheet. This is more so true in windows server infrastructure as many organizations resort to password-based auth for local and remote access. Of course, security-conscious organizations would use a password vault. But in any case, password storage in any form is often an Achilles heel in infrastructure security.

We are excited to welcome Windows hosts to the Teleport Access Plane. For the past 5 years we’ve helped refine our Access Plane for Linux hosts, providing short-lived certificate-based access, RBAC and developer-friendly access to resources. As we’ve rolled Teleport to larger organizations, we found that people wanted the same convenience and security of Teleport but for Windows hosts.