The Year of the Application-Aware VPN

2025 was a defining year for Border0. We introduced the world’s first application-aware VPN, bringing Zero Trust Application Access to engineering teams that need modern security without operational friction. Border0 is designed to be easy to adopt on day one, and powerful enough to scale as your team, infrastructure, and compliance needs evolve. This year we expanded identity-first access across more of the resources teams rely on most, including Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Windows RDP, directly from the browser. Along the way, we shipped major upgrades like ephemeral identities for just-in-time access and AI-powered session insights for clearer visibility without noise. Every step moved us closer to one goal: secure access that matches how modern teams actually build and operate.

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‍Redefining Secure Access with the World's First Application-Aware VPN

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One of our most important milestones came early in the year with the launch of the world’s first application-aware VPN.

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The decision to build a VPN didn’t come from trying to be a VPN company -- it came directly from customer reality. Teams were already using Border0 as their PAM layer to secure access to high-value infrastructure, but they still had to keep a traditional VPN around for the handful of apps that didn’t fit neatly into existing access patterns. That gap reflects where we believe the market is heading: PAM and VPN are converging into a single, cohesive access layer. Border0 is our vision of that future: application-aware VPN + identity-first PAM, unified under one policy model and one audit trail. The result is vendor consolidation, consistent experiences for engineers (and contractors), and tighter Zero Trust security without expanding network blast radius. We’re proud to have been first to ship it.
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Access That Matches How Modern Teams Operate
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The team jokes that everything we build must follow 'the rule of cool'. While that may sound trivial, it's actually a good guideline. 'Cool' for us means easy, intuitive, and logical.

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A great example? We all know it's easy to let access sprawl. Even with good intentions, sometimes things just slip through the cracks. So we introduced ephemeral identities, enabling short-lived, just-in-time access for users, workloads, and automation. With --ephemeral, clients register and connect like normal, then disappear when they’re done. After disconnect + five minutes idle, Border0 purges the device and identity, keeping orgs clean and secure by default.

We also increased support for automation with tag-driven access control. You can grant or restrict access based on cloud resource tags, so that as your infrastructure evolves, access follows, with no manual updates and no brittle rules.
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Long Live Agentless Access!
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Continuing with the 'rule of cool'? Agentless access. We firmly believe security tools work best when people actually want to use them, and nothing exemplifies this quite like the ease of using our beautiful web clients. We went hard in the paint on this idea in 2025, listening to user feedback and building clients for:

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• Kubernetes -- perform routine tasks like scaling deployments or checking the health of your clusters, without needing expertise in kubectl
• MongoDB -- identity-aware database access, directly from your browser
• Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL
• RDP -- enabling secure, auidted access to Windows environments via the browser
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These capabilities help us deliver on our promise to be way more  than a VPN. Border0 is a developer productivity tool, because we want you to be focused on your OWN 'rule of cool'. (Want to see how other teams are using Border0 to transform access? Check out our Case Studies!) 

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Smarter Security with AI Session Insights

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One more huge quality-of-life improvement we shipped? AI Session Insights.

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We've already established that Border0 empowers your team to work fast -- but at the end of the day you're also counting on everything being logged and recorded so that you can answer critical questions in the event of an incident, or present evidence for an audit.

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If your team is like most, there could be thousands of logs and sessions generated every day. How could anyone sift through all of that? 
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Born out of a great Hack-a-thon idea, our AI Session Insights helps teams cut through the noise and focus on exactly what matters. Instead of manually reviewing session replays, our LLM generates a quick summary of each session, generates a risk score, and surfaces any anomalous or malicious behavior that might need additional scrutiny.

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A Little Fun: Border0 on Raspberry Pi
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While we focused most of our efforts on the enterprise, we also reserved a little time to let the team experiment with Home Lab use cases. (Basically, we let Greg off leash!) 
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We released a RaspberryPi image that turns your Pi into a secure WifFi router. It's perfect for home labs, remote work setups, or just hacking on zero-trust networking in a fun, tangible way. We welcome you to try it out if you haven't already, and join us on our Community Slack to give us your feedback! 
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Community-influenced innovation
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There's no substitute for live convos with the teams building and operating real infrastructure. This year we ventured to San Francisco for RSAC, Atlanta for KubeCon, and Vegas for AWS re:Invent, connecting with security leaders, SREs, and platform engineers, discussing the realities of modern access. Scaling Zero Trust in a world that is constantly evolving is a real challenge, and it's so important to us to hear directly from our users about their pain points, priorities, and preferences.

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Again and again, we heard the same themes: teams want fewer access tools, clearer policies, and a consistent experience across everything they manage. That feedback directly shaped what we shipped from application-aware VPN functionality to DNS-based routing, expanded agentless access, and just-in-time identity controls.

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2025 was a year of momentum: broader protocol support, deeper identity-aware controls, and faster, more frictionless access. Perhaps more importantly, it was a year of validation. Our community continues to confirm that access tooling must evolve alongside modern infrastructure, and we’re committed to building in lockstep with the teams who rely on Border0 every day.

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Thank you!

To every customer, community member, partner, and conference attendee who shared feedback, ideas, and trust — thank you.

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We’re incredibly excited for what’s ahead, and we can’t wait to keep building the future of secure access with you in 2026.
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— The Border0 Team

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