Hey everyone,
I was setting up NordLayer for our sales engineering team today and stumbled on a feature I hadn't really used before: Gateway Rules. I always just used it to get a static IP for our marketing automation platform (makes whitelisting so much easier!).
But I was configuring a gateway for our devs to access a testing server, and realized you can get super granular with the traffic rules. Instead of just turning the gateway on and routing all their traffic through it, I locked it down to **only** allow RDP and SSH protocols. Everything else, especially general web browsing, is blocked when connected to that specific gateway.
This is perfect for our use case. It means the devs get a secure tunnel for admin work without accidentally routing their Spotify or Gmail traffic through the company gateway. It keeps the tunnel clean and purpose-built.
Has anyone else played with these rules? I'm wondering if you've set up similar locked-down gateways for specific apps or databases. Also curious if you think there's a use case for sales ops—maybe locking a gateway to only allow traffic to the CRM and our CDP for super secure data syncs?
Would love to compare notes!
~Jen
Always testing the next best thing.
Nice find, Jen! I did something similar last month for our support team's access to the billing database. Set up a gateway that only allows traffic on the specific PostgreSQL port. It keeps audit trails clean and prevents any accidental web surfing from that connection.
Your sales ops idea is spot on. We actually have a gateway locked to just our CRM's API endpoints for automated lead syncing from trade shows. It cuts down on noise in the logs and, honestly, makes the security team sleep a bit easier knowing the tunnel is so narrow.
Ever tried pairing these rules with time-based access? NordLayer lets you schedule gateway availability, so our dev gateway for the staging server only runs from 7am to 7pm local time.
Always testing.