Identity-Native Infrastructure Access Management

Chapter 7. Scaling Access: An Example Using Teleport

So far, we’ve covered the fundamental pillars of infrastructure access: identity, connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit. By now, the benefits of the identity-native approach are clear. By tying true identity to access and policy to data, you can scale across increasingly complex computing environments without sacrificing agility or security. At the same time, the identity-native approach removes human error vectors such as secrets and perimeter-based defense, making the entire environment more secure and removing the potency of attacks such as phishing. This adds up to the most important benefit of all: making access easy at scale.

In this chapter, we will explore the available open source tools and techniques for implementing identity-native principles to scale access in practice. For the purpose of the discussion, we’ll examine Teleport, which at the time of this writing is the only open source project that combines the principles of identity-native access, such as Zero Trust connectivity and secretless architecture.

Access at Scale

Scaling access with the infrastructure needs of a growing organization is important for both security and productivity. As an organization grows, however, the complexity of access increases geometrically across three primary dimensions: hardware, software, and peopleware.

The infrastructure footprint typically grows organically, following the areas where network traffic is increasing. ...