During my time as a penetration tester, I’ve seen many IT teams storing server catalogs with respective IP addresses and passwords in a sharable Excel sheet. This is more so true in windows server infrastructure as many organizations resort to password-based auth for local and remote access. Of course, security-conscious organizations would use a password vault. But in any case, password storage in any form is often an Achilles heel in infrastructure security.

We are excited to welcome Windows hosts to the Teleport Access Plane. For the past 5 years we’ve helped refine our Access Plane for Linux hosts, providing short-lived certificate-based access, RBAC and developer-friendly access to resources. As we’ve rolled Teleport to larger organizations, we found that people wanted the same convenience and security of Teleport but for Windows hosts.

If your organization runs cloud-native workloads on a mixed infrastructure of Linux and Windows, this announcement of Teleport 8 is for you! TL;DR Teleport 8 enables easy and secure remote access to a mixed fleet of Linux/SSH and Windows/RDP hosts via a single TCP/IP port. Before we dive deeper into how it works, let’s introduce Teleport to new readers of this blog.

In today’s IT environments, operating systems blend into each other. In on-premises and hybrid or public cloud scenarios, Windows clients connect to Linux-based web servers and Kubernetes containers or microservices. There are several Windows-friendly SSH clients available to keep these connections secure.

In our last blog post How to Pass a FedRAMP Audit for SaaS Providers: Part 1 , we looked at what FedRAMP is and why it matters for SaaS providers. We also discussed a success story with one publicly traded Teleport SaaS customer who used Teleport to pass their FedRAMP audit.