Vanta Integration: Real-Time Compliance Checks Before Access is Granted

In this blog, we’ll explore how Border0’s integration with Vanta enables network access based on real-time compliance data, ensuring employees meet all compliance requirements before accessing your servers, databases, or containers.

Many engineering organizations have compliance requirements that employees must meet before granting them access to production servers and services. These requirements may include background checks, policy acceptance, security training, and device monitoring software. Traditionally, this verification process is manual, error-prone, and limited to a one-time check.

Today, we introduce a solution that eliminates human verification entirely from the provisioning process. Border0’s new Vanta integration allows administrators to define a set of requirements that are continuously verified—not just before access provisioning, but before every connection to a server, database, or container. This ensures compliance with any requirement changes or additions. If a user falls out of compliance, access is immediately revoked, and any existing connections are terminated.

Border0 policies with Vanta integration

At Border0, we provide secure, audited, easy-to-use access to your infrastructure and services. Our powerful policy engine allows you to define and enforce access policies that are both flexible and secure. Think of our policy language as a firewall rule on steroids! It allows you to define who should have access to what resources under what conditions. In this blog, we’ll focus on the conditions part. We're expanding our standard Who (users, groups, service accounts), Where (IP and Geo location), and When (dates and time of day) filters with an additional condition: your Vanta compliance data!

Vanta is a leading compliance tool that helps organizations meet their compliance requirements by ensuring employees complete necessary security training and accept policy documents. Vanta streamlines the compliance process, making it easier for companies to maintain their security posture. We’re a Vanta customer ourselves and it has been great for us in achieving and maintaining our SOC2 compliance status. Recently, Vanta released their improved REST API, allowing for easy access to the compliance status of your company data and employees. We’re going to use this new Vanta API to pull in employee compliance status and use this data to determine in real-time whether the employee is allowed access to your servers or not!

Getting Started

Getting started with the new Vanta integration is very straightforward. An administrator of your Vanta organization must first create an Application from the Developer Console and generate OAuth credentials (a client ID and client secret).

Then, an administrator of your Border0 organization can create an Integration of type “Vanta” in the Border0 Admin Portal, where they will provide the previously generated Vanta OAuth credentials.

Once the integration is created, it can be referenced in your Border0 policies along with a configuration on what specific requirements need to be enforced.

Real-World Example

Imagine a scenario where a new employee joins your company. Traditionally, the compliance team must manually verify that the employee has completed all necessary security training and accepted company policies before granting access to production servers. This process is time-consuming and prone to human error.

With Border0’s new Vanta integration, you can automate this entire process. Before every connection attempt, Border0 checks Vanta to ensure the employee has met all compliance requirements. If the requirements are not met, access is denied, ensuring your infrastructure remains secure and compliant. This continuous authorization means that if a user falls out of compliance, access is immediately revoked, and existing connections are terminated, keeping your infrastructure always compliant and secure.

Benefits of the Integration

Integrating Border0 with Vanta brings several significant advantages:

First, it ensures that your infrastructure access is always compliant with your organization’s security policies. This is achieved through continuous authorization checks, meaning any changes in compliance status are immediately reflected in access permissions.

Second, it eliminates the manual effort and potential errors associated with verifying compliance requirements. Automating these checks streamlines the process, allowing your team to focus on more critical tasks.

Thirdly, Border0 keeps track of all logins and sessions to your servers, whether it's a session to a database, SSH server, web app, or RDP server. We ensure all sessions are logged and recorded. Together with our Access Graphs, you’ll know exactly who has access to What servers and who accessed your servers. Both are huge parts of your compliance journey, making it much easier to answer compliance questions and breeze through your compliance audit. Trust me, you’ll impress your auditors with this data! 

Detailed visibility with Border0's Session logs and Replay

Finally, it enhances your overall security posture by integrating real-time compliance data into your access control policies. This dynamic approach ensures that only compliant users have access, reducing the risk of security breaches.

Wrap-Up

At Border0, we believe in streamlining your IT operations and leaving annoying tasks to the computers! The Vanta integration is a testament to our commitment to achieving zero trust and minimizing the chances for human error. By validating all compliance requirements in Vanta before access is even granted, we ensure your company is always in compliance. This integration showcases Border0's unique ability to enhance security and compliance through seamless integrations with third-party systems like Vanta.

Try out Border0 today and experience secure, audited, easy-to-use access to your infrastructure and services. Sign up for a demo or contact our team for more information.

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