Mapgears Empowers Engineers and Developers to Better Support Customers Using Teleport

Municipalities, trail management groups, campuses and other organizations that have significant land to manage — but don't have the resources to have dedicated geographic information systems (GIS) specialists — turn to Mapgears. The company provides GIS solutions for organizations that need real-time data for waste management, snow removal, trail management, tourism maps and more to coordinate supervision and information sharing.

“Our company picks up where the larger, well-known map companies leave off,” says Gabriel Cossette, DevOps Integrator at Mapgears. “We offer solutions that are extremely intuitive so that people that aren't GIS specialists have visibility and control they need over data and resources for effective management.”

The company's small-but-mighty team of engineers and developers are tasked with delivering a steady stream of mapping functionalities and product enhancements to support its customers' needs. The company's DevOps, security, and delivery strategies are supported by a wide range of open-source solutions that can be launched in cloud and on-premises environments, depending on customer requirements.

“We're an incredibly agile organization that's built its foundation on open-source technologies so that we can quickly tap into the expertise of individuals across the community, find answers for our clients to important questions, and scale to the needs of our customers,” says Cossette. “We've taken the same approach with how we provide access for our engineers and developers to customer environments.”

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The power of open source

When Mapgears began to evaluate access solutions, the IT team leveraged the open source community to identify possible solutions to provide internal teams fast, secure access to its DevOps and customer environments. Quickly, the company saw Teleport as a standout option because of its significant following and maturity. Once Mapgears started to review Teleport documentation, Cossette and team felt increasingly comfortable with this option.

Using the detailed documentation that was readily available, Cossette and team deployed Teleport across its own on-premises and cloud server infrastructure, as well as to provide access to each of its customer environments.

Mapgears' successful deployment also relied on the responsiveness of Teleport developers and the open-source community as a whole. For example, one day Cossette found a minor bug, reported it promptly, and got a response and fix within days from the community, rather than having to wait weeks for a solution from a vendor.

Empowering a small organization

As a small organization, Mapgears embraces technologies that streamline routine tasks, reduces maintenance, and simplifies processes. Teleport helps the company achieve these objectives and support several aspects of its business.

As the company grows, Teleport helps to accelerate onboarding by automating personnel access. “We're a rapidly growing business with new employees and new customers coming on all of the time,” says Cossette. “Teleport helps us bring on those new individuals faster and easier than what we were able to achieve without it. That includes onboarding, maintenance, and support.”

In addition to supercharging Mapgears' business by boosting its scalability and productivity, Teleport helps to provide a clear, unified view of who has permissions to what systems in real time. The company can see precisely who is accessing which servers and resources, helping to streamline auditing for compliance.

Also, Mapgears doesn't have to maintain a separate VPN. Using Teleport, users access resources securely without having to implement a VPN solution, reducing the number of passwords that employees and IT teams have to manage, while reducing attack vectors to their environment. The net result is having fewer secrets to maintain and a better employee experience.

One key strategy that Teleport supports for Mapgears is its need for redundancy. As remote access is a critical service, the company stood up redundant Teleport servers in different geographical regions. This ensures that access to the infrastructure would remain if any issue occurs in a specific data center.

Adopting leading open-source solutions, like Teleport, has delivered several side benefits for Mapgears, especially with recruitment. As the company strategically onboards new open-source technologies, Mapgears continually demonstrates how it is empowering its employees with the tools they need to be successful. This ongoing open-source adoption improves work experience by streamlining routine tasks, enabling employees to focus on higher-value initiatives.

What's next?

In the future, Mapgears sees a significant opportunity to expand how it uses Teleport by leveraging it to simplify management and access to its applications, infrastructure tools, desktop environments and databases. Additionally, as Mapgears migrates to Kubernetes, the company can maintain high levels of security by leveraging identity-native infrastructure access, helping to ensure that only authorized users have access to internal and customer resources.

About the customer

Mapgears is a firm specializing in intelligent mapping that provides turnkey solutions to organizations that need to visualize and manage their trails, roads, and territories in real time. Their goal is to bring people and geography together. With Mapgears products, clients don't need to be a geomatician to have access and manage all relevant geolocated data. As a great enthusiast of open source technologies, the Mapgears team is recognized throughout the world for its significant contribution in the development of the MapServer software and the GDAL/OGR interface.