This archive report was first published on 21 April 2020.
On April 21, 2020, Google introduced BeyondCorp Remote Access, a cloud solution designed to help employees and extended workforces access internal web apps securely from any device and location.
Traditional remote-access VPNs are often difficult to deploy for large numbers of workers at once, and their perimeter-based security approach can be problematic when granting access to an extended workforce that includes contractors and temporary workers.
“Over the last few weeks, we’ve had numerous conversations with customers about how we can help them adapt to new ways of working. While keeping their data protected,” Google Cloud’s Sunil Potti and Sampath Srinivas wrote in a blog post.
BeyondCorp Remote Access is based on Google’s zero-trust approach to security, which relies on verification of context, such as identity and device, to grant access to apps. It routes all traffic through a proxy to determine the identity of a user and what internal data they’re allowed to access in the given context.
Google adopted the BeyondCorp framework, a zero-trust approach to security, for its own mobile workforce back in 2011. The new tool uses this framework to offer secure access to internal browser-based apps hosted on GCP, on-premise, or other clouds.
