Show HN: Portal Cloud – VPN Service for Teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Portal Cloud – VPN Service for Teams

portal.cloud

25 pointsjeff39312 comments

Hi everyone, Co-founder of Portal Cloud VPN here.

Thanks for checking us out! We're about halfway through YC Startup School, and it's been an incredible experience so far (particularly getting to know/learn from our group). We just launched Portal Cloud VPN two weeks ago, and our goal is to enable teams to securely access private company resources (internal web apps/production servers etc..), and help remote employees or contractors secure their internet traffic.

We think all professionals & remote employees should be using a business-quality VPN, and would love to hear what you think (positive, or critical).

Thanks, Jeff@portal.cloud

What traffic do you inspect and log? If someone works in an industry like healthcare could you sign a BAA?

We don't inspect or log any customer traffic, and we treat your VPN server as private and confidential. We aren’t currently able to sign a HIPAA BAA, but we’re working on being able to do so in the future.

It seems like when this talks about "enabl[ing] teams to access private company resources", it means "access 3rd party cloud services that support IP whitelisting"? For example, if I set up another service on the internet to only allow connections from the dedicated VPN server IP. But it wouldn't let a remote employee access a service running in the company's office LAN. Am I misreading that?

Additionally, what protections are in place to ensure Portal Cloud staff aren't monitoring the traffic or accessing a customer's "private company resources"?

Yes, that's right. We're referring to IP whitelisting there. We're also adding (very shortly) site-to-site VPN connections, so users can link their AWS/GCP VPC or even a traditional office/datacenter LAN.

Even with a VPN, any sensitive services should have their own auth and logging enabled. Requiring a VPN doesn't remove the need for other forms of security, but it does add a very effective layer of security. We also have a strong business incentive not to violate the trust of our customers. We're hoping to prove that we can be trusted over time, and to use technology to reduce the need for trust.

Does this tunnel all internet traffic through the VPN or has it the option to only tunnel traffic to certain addresses?

Our current OpenVPN set up involves whitelisting addresses for which traffic needs to go through the VPN. All other traffic goes around the VPN. Does Portal Cloud VPN support a set up this?

You're offering a good service. Many dev and QA teams are looking for this kind of solutions.

I don't see the point considering it takes about 5 minutes to setup OpenVPN on a server? Am I missing something?

Is this different from a regular VPN? I’m not getting it from the web site how “Team VPN” is different from a regular one.

The biggest difference is that you really do get your own private server running the OpenVPN and WireGuard daemons. Your team members get accounts on your server but no else does. Your server has a dedicated IP address for whitelisting, auto-scales with usage, and has no artificial limits on number of users you can add (though we do have recommendations for performance).

We're also adding site-to-site links with AWS/GCP VPC very soon and have transparent pricing.

The consumer VPN providers are pretty good for what they're designed for but are generally lacking the features businesses need. And the business VPNs are generally much worse to buy and use. We're working to build a consumer-quality business VPN.

Thanks for the question!

Ok, so you’re comparing the service to standard consumer “anonymizing” VPNs, which no real business would be using. You’re probably better off (and need to address in your value proposition) comparing to VPNs provided by standard firewalls that would normally be used in a business, like Cisco AnyConnect, etc. That’s what your real competition is.

Corporate VPNs are mostly used by old businesses thar have a lot of legacy infrastructure on the "internal network". That market may be hard to crack and it's an obsolete model, thus a shrinking market.

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