What is HCP Boundary?
HCP Boundary is a fully-managed, cloud-based, workflow that enables secure connections to remote hosts and critical systems across cloud and on-premise environments. As a managed service, HCP Boundary enables zero-trust networking without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. To get started with HCP Boundary today, visit our onboarding guide.
Why HCP Boundary?
HCP Boundary reduces the complexity of managing access to infrastructure, and enables the user to simply log in, select the desired host or system, and connect. HCP Boundary handles the routing, connections, and credential brokering on the backend. Users securely connect to their remote systems or hosts without exposing a credential, address, or network.
The need for secure remote access to dynamic environments is growing rapidly, and today's solutions (such as VPNs, SSH bastions, and PAM) fail to scale effectively in ephemeral, multi-cloud environments. Current solutions are complex and require multiple network addresses, credentials, permissions, and expertise for users to access remote hosts and systems. These solutions commonly grant users access to entire networks and credentials, vastly increasing the attack surface area. Users oftentimes require multiple credentials for the network, hosts, and possibly services. With ephemeral environments, maintaining addresses is even more brittle and onboarding or offboarding users is often manual, resulting in increased overhead, tickets with helpdesk, and time to value.
For administrators: Boundary provides a simple way for verified users to have secure access to cloud and self-managed infrastructures without exposing your network or the use of managing credentials. Boundary fully automates workflows for both user and target onboarding, which drastically minimizes the configuration overhead for operators and, unlike traditional access solutions, enables them to keep users and targets up-to-date in cloud environments. HCP Boundary makes it even easier to take advantage of Boundary by removing the operational overhead of managing it in your environment.
For developers: Boundary offers developers a standardized workflow for connecting to their infrastructure, wherever it resides. Boundary's consistent access workflow removes the need to manage target credentials or target network addresses. This increases developer productivity by reducing time spent figuring out how to connect to remote systems. Boundary's automated service discovery provides an easier and faster experience for accessing dynamic infrastructure.
Tutorial
Refer to the Getting Started with HCP Boundary tutorial to get hands-on with HCP Boundary and set up your managed Boundary environment.
Looking for Boundary fundamentals?
Read core Boundary documentation and tutorials, including self-hosted open source docs.
