NetFoundry

NetFoundry is the company behind OpenZiti, the open source zero-trust networking project, and provides a managed cloud service for deploying, managing, and operating zero-trust overlay networks at scale. NetFoundry's platform enables organizations to eliminate traditional VPN infrastructure and firewall-based access controls by embedding networking directly into applications using OpenZiti SDKs.

The software-defined connectivity model that NetFoundry promotes is fundamentally different from network-level access control. Traditional VPNs grant access at the network level, allowing authenticated users to communicate with any host in the connected network segment. NetFoundry's approach embeds the security boundary inside the application itself using SDKs, so that only applications with the correct cryptographic identity can communicate, regardless of the underlying network.

NetFoundry Console provides a centralized management interface for creating and managing zero-trust networks, managing identities, configuring access policies, and monitoring network activity. Organizations use the console to define which identities (users, services, devices) are permitted to access which services, with cryptographically enforced policies that cannot be bypassed by network-level tricks.

The NetFoundry Fabric is the globally distributed network infrastructure that provides the routing, relay, and control plane for NetFoundry-based overlay networks. The Fabric is deployed across major cloud regions worldwide, providing the latency optimization and redundancy needed for production applications. Organizations using NetFoundry Cloud do not need to operate their own network infrastructure, relying instead on the managed Fabric.

Edge Router management through the NetFoundry platform allows deploying edge routers on customer infrastructure to provide local network access points. Edge routers improve performance for users and services in specific locations by providing a nearby entry point to the NetFoundry Fabric.

Developer integration using the OpenZiti SDKs for Java, Go, Python, Node.js, Swift, and other languages enables embedding zero-trust connectivity directly in application code. The SDK handles all aspects of the zero-trust connection including identity enrollment, policy evaluation, and encrypted tunneling, requiring only a few lines of code to add zero-trust networking to any application.