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The Best BeyondTrust Alternative for Infrastructure Access
Teleport vs BeyondTrust
Learn why organizations trust Teleport to provide modern access for today's infrastructure needs.
Approach to Identity
Legacy Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions, like BeyondTrust, rely on static credentials. Teleport implements trusted computing with a foundation of cryptographic identity and phishing-resistant authentication to mitigate the risks of credential theft and unauthorized access – fundamental security issues in today’s threat landscape.
Static credentials are long-lived, shareable, and vulnerable to compromise. In contrast, cryptographic identities are immune to social engineering compromise. When coupled with least privileged access, companies can significantly reduce attack surface and streamline engineer access in modern infrastructure environments.
Uses static credentials
BeyondTrust relies on static credentials. These are long-lived, reusable secrets like passwords, API keys, or SSH keys, to grant access to resources. Developers and engineers must retrieve, manage, and authenticate using these credentials.
Static credentials are prone to theft, phishing attacks, and misuse because they do not expire automatically and often require manual rotation. Static credentials are also harder to trace back to specific users or actions, making them a significant security risk.
Eliminates credential-based risks with cryptographic identities
Teleport eliminates the use of credentials completely. Instead, Teleport uses short-lived, dynamically issued certificates based on public-key cryptography.
These certificates expire automatically, eliminating the risks of long-term credential exposure. Cryptographic identity provides strong, phishing-resistant authentication tied to specific users, machines, or workloads and aligns with zero trust principles by requiring verification of every entity before granting access.
Approach to Protocols
Legacy PAM solutions like BeyondTrust are not well suited for infrastructure access use cases because they lack the infrastructure-centric protocols that modern engineering teams require.
IT-centric protocols prioritize human-centric workflows and enterprise access, while infrastructure-centric protocols focus on securing interactions between systems, machines, and complex infrastructure components. The latter is critical to support modern, cloud-native environments.
Uses IT-centric protocols
BeyondTrust and other legacy PAM solutions are meant for IT-centric use cases and do not adapt well to engineering teams and modern infrastructure.
BeyondTrust leverages protocols focused on user access and authentication in enterprise IT environments that hinge on human workflows and tools. Examples include LDAP, Kerberos, and SAML, which support traditional enterprise systems like Active Directory and identity providers for user management and single sign-on (SSO).
Provides comprehensive infrastructure-centric protocols
Teleport uses comprehensive, infrastructure-centric protocols to enable seamless and secure access for humans and machines.
Teleport secures communication and access in dynamic, infrastructure-focused environments like cloud-native applications, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines. Examples include SSH, mTLS, and X.509 certificates, which support workload communication, machine identities, and ephemeral resource management.
Approach to Access Control
The basic access controls that legacy PAM solutions like BeyondTrust rely on make it difficult to scale access securely within cloud-native or hybrid infrastructures – piling more management and upkeep tasks onto your already over-burdened infrastructure team’s plate.
Unified, fine-grained access controls enhance security by reducing the risks of weak or fragmented access policies, while simplifying operational overhead. Role-based access controls (RBAC) reduce over-permissioning and simplify management responsibilities, boosting productivity by ensuring engineers get the right access when they need it without unnecessary delays.
Provides basic access controls
While BeyondTrust excels at managing access across traditional IT environments, extending the same level of control across modern, cloud-native infrastructure – including ephemeral resources like containers and microservices – can be challenging.
BeyondTrust’s reliance on static policies and predefined configurations can make it difficult to fine-tune and consistently enforce access controls across complex, distributed architectures. Doing so often requires extensive configuration efforts – time-consuming for infrastructure teams and prone to human error. This can result in fragmented access silos, increasing the risk of misconfigurations, inefficiencies, and unintended security gaps.
Unifies access controls and policies across infrastructure
Teleport’s modern, cloud-native approach to infrastructure access simplifies access controls and policies across complex environments including dynamic infrastructure like Kubernetes and across multi or hybrid-cloud environments.
Fine-grained access controls and dynamic policies adapt to modern architectures without requiring extensive configuration or weighing down infrastructure teams with manual upkeep. Controls can be defined with RBAC and scaled across all resources in a unified and consistent manner, eliminating the potential for access siloes and misconfiguration risks.
Approach to Integrations
Legacy PAM solutions like BeyondTrust do not integrate well with modern cloud-native and hybrid infrastructures — or with the toolkits that developers rely on for their daily work.
IT-centric integrations address user-focused workflows and enterprise IT needs, while infrastructure and developer-focused integrations enable secure, automated operations in dynamic environments, catering to engineering and operational efficiency.
Focused on managing IT environments
IT teams primarily leverage BeyondTrust to manage access and permissions for IT environments. Utilizing these tools for infrastructure access often creates friction due to a lack of infrastructure-centric or developer-centric integrations.
IT-centric integrations prioritize enterprise tools and systems used for managing users, workflows, and compliance in IT environments. Examples include integrations with identity providers (Okta, Azure AD), IT service management tools (ServiceNow, Jira), and HR systems. These prioritize user access, compliance workflows, and centralized IT operations.
Purpose built for modern infrastructure
Teleport support tools and technologies specific to managing cloud-native and hybrid infrastructures. Examples include Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, and CI/CD pipelines. These integrations prioritize secure machine-to-machine communication, workload automation, and infrastructure scaling.
Teleport is tailored for developers and DevOps teams, focusing on enhancing productivity and seamless workflows. Examples include integrations with GitHub, GitLab, kubectl, and APIs/SDKs for programmatic access. These emphasize ease of use, automation, and development flexibility.
Teleport's Key Features
Unified Access
On-demand least privileged access on a foundation of cryptographic identity and zero trust
Machine & Workload Identity
Improve infrastructure resiliency by securing access to systems and data
Works with everything you have
AWS
GCP
Azure
Prometheus
Entra
Puppet
Okta
Buildkite
Windows
Active Directory
Helm
Chef
Ansible
Travis CL
OneLogin
Backstage