Summary: “NordLayer gives us real peace of mind. I know that’s intangible, but when you own a business, and you have the care of employees and clients, it’s nice to get a good night’s sleep.”
Founded in 2004, InfoPathways started as a data management software company for construction and engineering firms. The industry wasn’t ready for “big data” yet, but it was ready for better IT. So the company expanded its focus to include building networks, deploying business software, and supporting infrastructure.
InfoPathways is based in Westminster, Maryland, and now serves organizations with complex environments and compliance requirements in the pharmaceutical, biotech, healthcare, engineering, and nonprofit sectors.
“We provide managed services, but we don’t consider ourselves a typical MSP because we do whatever our clients need us to do,” says Theresa Bethune, President of InfoPathways. That flexibility has earned InfoPathways long-term relationships—many customers have been with them for 10 or even 15 years
InfoPathways’ team of around 27 is distributed across 3 US states, with additional dedicated resources in India. The company turned to NordLayer because it needed to replace what Thomas Bethune, Chief Innovation Officer, calls “a hodgepodge of different VPN solutions.”
Before NordLayer, InfoPathways supported whatever each client happened to have installed, and some of them used an array of different VPNs Thomas Bethune says:
“My team would go in and find a Cisco VPN here, a UniFi VPN there, WireGuard somewhere else. At one time, we were supporting 15 different VPN solutions across multiple platforms, and none of them worked well from an enterprise perspective.”
That VPN patchwork made it hard to maintain consistent security standards. It was also a challenge as many of InfoPathways’ clients have to meet compliance requirements like GDPR or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
“We even have contractors in the US who work for the Department of War that are required to meet higher levels of compliance.”
Customers who have to comply with, for example, CMMC Level 2 compliance are required to deploy specific security features. That’s why InfoPathways was looking for a solution that would help them satisfy that need.
Another challenge was the rise of remote work Theresa Bethune remembers:
“We went from securing a couple of company premises and maybe a couple of remote workers to 60, 100, 200 users who were now remote. We didn’t know if their network connections were safe or not. From a security point of view, that was a major risk.”
For InfoPathways, whose customers are subject to regulation and handle intellectual property, patient records, or controlled unclassified information, that level of uncertainty wasn’t acceptable. NordLayer gave the IT service provider a way to fill that security gap
InfoPathways has been a NordLayer customer since it became available through Pax8 and our partnership has grown from there. What won Thomas over was centralized security control over cloud-based infrastructure
“One of the things I like most about NordLayer is that it helps me build and manage an ‘on-the-wire’ infrastructure out in the cloud on the fly.”
When InfoPathways’ team sets up a new client, they create virtual private gateways for specific resources or systems. This allows control over which destinations traffic can reach, how split tunneling is configured, and how users function on the network
NordLayer’s Control Panel also gives the team near-real-time visibility into who’s connected, where they are located, and what they are doing And if 6 people scattered across 3 locations suddenly need to work as one network, Thomas can spin up a gateway in minutes.
InfoPathways’ philosophy is simple. They work with clients for whom technology is either a business requirement or a major contributor to success. Cybersecurity isn’t an add-on for every client, but it’s built into everything
“We treat cybersecurity as integral to IT operations, so we don’t sell it separately. At a minimum, we require strong EDR, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and cybersecurity awareness training with phishing sims—and we always encourage using NordLayer and NordPass on top of that.”
InfoPathways is systematically moving clients off legacy software and onto NordLayer. Instead of inheriting whatever a previous provider left behind, every deployment now follows the same pattern.
“Hooking up a VPN to a new site is now a 15-minute activity—it takes longer to log in than for us to build it,” Thomas says. The contrast with legacy hardware is stark
For one client, InfoPathways deployed a cloud-based system that connects via VPN to laboratory instruments inside their facility. They run 3 environments—test, dev, and production—and all 3 need to be accessible to their sites at all times.
“The problem statement was controlling what traffic could cross that VPN, as we didn’t want things from their network to be able to see ours. And we were able to engineer that.”
The whole process was very fast:
“On a Cisco router, that would have taken me months. It was done in an afternoon. Our side was built within hours—it just took a day of troubleshooting to get them up and running.”
Pairing NordLayer with multi-factor authentication (MFA) lets InfoPathways apply conditional access policies—blocking suspicious logins, restricting access by location, and routing every connection through a known IP address.
“There’s been a significant reduction in issues with people logging in. NordLayer helps us use conditional access much more efficiently, and that has cut tickets down tremendously.”
Theresa adds that it also removes a whole category of IT tickets:
“We don’t have people calling in saying, ‘Well, this week I’m working from London, and tomorrow I’m going to be working in Japan—can’t you just connect me?’ With NordLayer, we’re way ahead of the game on that.”
NordLayer’s Control Panel gives the InfoPathways team a clear record of connection logs—who connected, from where, and when—which proved its value during a recent incident. After a client’s employee was terminated but temporarily left with system access, the employee deleted around a hundred files within minutes.
“We were able to show where the employee was and what they were connected to. We could say that they connected to the AWS gateway starting at 7:30 in the morning and didn’t shut down until we shut them off at this point.”
For Theresa, the impact goes beyond operations. Clients offload risk to InfoPathways—and risk equals money.
“If we’re not doing anything to mitigate risk, we’re exposed to financial loss and penalties.”
She summarizes the partnership with NordLayer, saying that it brings her peace of mind.
“I know that’s intangible, but when you own a business, and you have the care of employees and clients, it’s nice to get a good night’s sleep.”
Thomas and Theresa Bethune share what they’d tell any business or fellow MSP:
InfoPathways replaced its fragmented mix of VPNs with NordLayer The platform can be deployed in minutes, helps enforce conditional access, and gives InfoPathways visibility into who’s connecting from where. The result is fewer IT tickets, stronger compliance for clients in highly regulated industries, and an MSP offering built on trusted tools.
Want to standardize your clients’ network security and cut deployment times from months to minutes? Become a NordLayer partner
Joanna Krysińska
Senior Cybersecurity Copywriter
Joanna writes about zero trust, network security, access control, and threat prevention, but her cup of tea is compliance and how regulations shape security controls. Her work also includes the dark web topics and the methods cybercriminals use to target companies, such as social engineering or ransomware attacks, for example.
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