Anastasiya Novikava
Copywriter
Anastasiya believes cybersecurity should be easy to understand. She is particularly interested in studying nation-state cyber-attacks. Outside of work, she enjoys history, 1930s screwball comedies, and Eurodance music.
Eldorado.gg is a gaming startup developing e-commerce business projects. The company has an extensive portfolio, currently developing 3 projects for gaming and crypto communities. The team responsible for creating innovative gaming products and services is entirely based in Lithuania, with an office in Vilnius. Based on principle release–test–kill–or–scale, Eldorado.gg projects include global markets and gamer-targeted solutions like in-game item and account trading marketplace Eldorado.gg.
Business model of the Eldorado.gg and the pandemic helped the company to grow incredibly fast. Started with a team of 10 people, today, the organization counts over 60 employees. Rapid growth is often led by user management and network security challenges. Head of Operations Dainius Kudarauskas shares how NordLayer was the most effective solution after trying everything else.
The Challenge
Manage the increasing number of employee IP addresses
The company was continually operating in a hybrid work environment — employees could choose work locations according to their preferences way before the pandemic and once the restrictions were lifted.
To ensure smooth business operations, the company had to provide employees access to admin tools to conduct their daily tasks. Security practices like individual users’ IP address allowlisting were sufficient for a small team scope. However, quick company scaling proved that such practices aren’t sustainable for the business.
Once a small business suddenly expanded, intense hiring of developers and customer support specialists combined with remote work arrangements multiplied IP addresses that had to be managed efficiently.
Manual IP allowlisting drained time from developers responsible for managing every organization’s member IP address. For a startup, wasting resources is simply a luxury. Yet, what solution would work best to reduce workload and increase productivity, maintaining an extra layer of security for the systems?
The Solution
Trial and error for finding the most suitable tool
The individual IP safelisting proved too debilitating with fast-scaling teams. Eldorado.gg went through a consistent evolution while discovering what works best for their company.
The first solution was enabling cookies to save new IP addresses once, so it doesn’t have to be handled repeatedly. However, over time such practice proved time-consuming and tedious.
A poorly supervised list of IP addresses on the list created security holes. Even one compromised IP address can lead to someone outside the company gaining access to company systems, admin tools, or crypto wallets, depending on the project.
The next decision was to establish a VPN at the company via Internet Service Provider (ISP) by setting up on-site routers and allowlisting office IP. All was left for employees to connect to the HQ with their credentials and access the requested systems.
Yet, it didn’t last long enough for the customer support team to start reporting ongoing connectivity issues. Constantly dealing with administrative tools and client inquiries on a live chat, random disconnections resulted in poor user and customer experience.
Unexpected disconnections and constant re-logins to the VPN client in the meantime losing logs and conversations with customers quickly lead customer-facing employees to frustration and a drop in performance.
Anyone involved in the situation was affected, and as the issue tended to repeat itself without a possible fix, an alternative tool was required ASAP.
Why choose NordLayer?
NordLayer replaced the crashing Eldorado.gg VPN solution with a smoothly running client that provides an uninterrupted connection.
Utilizing virtual private gateways allowed the company to enable IP allowlisting for organization members and ensure access controls to the network. The solution doesn’t require hands-on maintenance and in-house hardware configuration.
To make sure it’s a great fit, we ran NordLayer trial with a sample pool of employees who had the most sensitive VPN use cases — once it was clear no issues appeared, we instantly implemented the solution.
The benefit of NordLayer is the option to segment teams by projects and allowlist their IP addresses accordingly. Such a feature mitigates the data breach risk and exposure of sensitive data to role-irrelevant users establishing even more robust network security.
IP allowlisting journey of Eldorado.gg
It’s crucial to understand that one employee doesn’t necessarily mean one IP address per user. Hybrid work is a dynamic approach to a job location, extending the capacity of sensitive leads a fewfold.
The Outcome
Fewer struggles — more focus on the actual job
Using NordLayer was simple from the start, especially easy compared with the initially used tools at the company. For a tech-savvy team, it was a no-questions-asked onboarding.
Solution implementation is as direct as receiving an email, accepting the invite, and downloading the app — no black magic.
The tool seamlessly integrated with existing company cloud systems and relieved developers and customer support teams from repetitive and distracting manual IP addresses’ management and unpredictable connection frictions and app crashes while securing the company resources.
Complaints decreased significantly — employees no longer have to worry about sudden disconnection. VPN shouldn’t be an important part of thinking but just run in the background, and NordLayer does exactly that.
Even though the primary use case for Eldorado.gg was IP allowlisting, other NordLayer features, to some extent, enabled the startup’s service and product development.
Virtual shared gateways support testing environments for geolocation-specific restrictions. Besides IP allowlisting, team segmentation helps streamline user access management for responsible managers and secure information assets.
Pro cybersecurity tips
Despite the amplitude of cyber challenges each company face, security culture is universal. Therefore, we ask IT professionals to share their cybersecurity must-dos, which might be a positive factor in establishing network protection hygiene routines.
Focus insights by Head of Operations of Eldorado.gg Dainius Kudarauskas, relevant for any modern business:
Have you noticed that security practices in your company could be consolidated and help achieve better results? Repetitive distractions leave space for mistakes and affect productivity — if you need a solution to elevate employee and service performance, reach out to learn more about agile network access security.
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