OpenVPN: Enabling access to the corporate network with Cloud Identity credentials

Editor’s note: Cloud Identity, Google Cloud’s identity as a service (IDaaS) platform, now offers secure LDAP functionality that enables authentication, authorization, and user/group lookups for LDAP-based apps and IT infrastructure. Today, we hear from OpenVPN, which has tested and integrated its OpenVPN Access Server with secure LDAP, enabling your employees and partners to use their Cloud Identity credentials to access applications through VPN. Read on to learn more.

As IT organizations adopt more cloud-based IaaS and SaaS apps, they need a way to let users access them securely, while still being able to use legacy LDAP-based apps and infrastructure. The new secure LDAP capabilities in Cloud Identity provides both legacy LDAP platforms and cloud-native applications with a single authentication source, for a simple, effective solution to this problem.

In fact, we here at OpenVPN have integrated our OpenVPN Access Server with Cloud Identity, allowing your remote users to connect to your corporate network and apps over VPN with their Cloud Identity (or G Suite) credentials. This helps keep your company secure, and ensures your entire team is following the protocol.

This illustration demonstrates how Cloud Identity makes security accessible and efficient for any level of enterprise. The top-half of the illustration shows the deployment of OpenVPN Access Server in various cloud IaaS providers. As you can see, all instances of Access Server use Cloud Identity for authentication and authorization. The Access Servers are configured with a group called ‘IT Admin,’ which allows SSH access to all application servers on all the private networks. This allows any employee identity present in Cloud Identity that is a member of ‘IT Admin’ group to access any of the private networks via VPN and use SSH.