Hi everyone, I’m Tom. I’ve been lurking for a while but finally have a reason to post.
I’m part of a team planning a network security overhaul for a retail chain with about 30 physical stores. We’re currently using a pretty old VPN setup for connecting our POS systems and back-office stuff to headquarters, and it’s… not great. Management wants to move to a more modern zero-trust model.
I’ve been researching and NordLayer and Cloudflare Zero Trust keep coming up as top contenders. From what I can tell, NordLayer seems more straightforward for a “lift and shift” of our existing site-to-site connections, while Cloudflare has that whole ecosystem. But I’m honestly a bit nervous about choosing the wrong path and causing downtime during the migration.
Could anyone share experiences with either for a multi-location setup like ours? I’m especially worried about the practical rollout. How long does it realistically take to get 30 locations migrated and stable? Are we looking at weeks or months? And is the agent deployment pretty hands-on for each store server, or can it be centralized?
Any step-by-step insights or things you wish you’d known before starting would be a huge help. 😅 We’re leaning towards cloud (AWS/Azure) for the long term, but right now we just need a secure and reliable bridge.
One step at a time