Twingate Boosts Real-Time Security and Scalability w/ PubNub

“We’ve had steady growth with PubNub, and haven’t experienced any major outages. That’s the key element that gives us most confidence in PubNub.”

- Sagie Shamay, Director of Engineering at Twingate

Meet Twingate

Twingate’s mission is to empower organizations and people to do their best work from anywhere. They provide a modern, secure, zero-trust network access solution for modern, cloud-native businesses. This is accomplished by building software that removes the friction and complexity from security and helps companies maintain velocity without compromising security. 

This means that any employee who needs secure access to technical infrastructure, SaaS apps, or other company resources can use Twingate to quickly and easily get on with their job, no matter where they’re located.

Twingate’s unique enterprise peer-to-peer architecture eliminates challenges related to legacy VPNs' and cloud proxy models' security, performance, and reliability.

The need to move on from periodic polling

Before PubNub, Twingate only had some periodical polling server updates based on a user request. Sagie Shamay, the Director of Engineering at Twingate, started looking for a full, real-time solution to propagate configuration changes and manage access in real-time. Shamay found several different vendors with a quick Google search, but with a little bit of market research, Shamay found that PubNub’s cross-platform capabilities was exactly what they needed.

Leveraging PubNub for real-time updates and presence detection

By integrating PubNub, Twingate transitioned to real-time updates based on a server push, distributing hundreds of thousands of messages from their server to their end users instantaneously. Previously, users received updates every 5 minutes. Now, with PubNub’s WebSockets keeping the connection between server and device open, updates are delivered in just 1 second. This allows for constant, real-time communication between server and device. By using PubNub’s real-time APIs, developers can create powerful, event-driven applications to facilitate real-time communication across all devices.

Additionally, Twingate uses PubNub’s Presence Detection, which allows real-time tracking of users' online and offline statuses, along with monitoring activity in specific channels. It provides insights into user engagement, device connectivity, and session duration, helping businesses create more interactive and dynamic experiences. This is particularly helpful to Twingate’s IT admin customers, as they can easily monitor which assets are on or offline. 

An enhanced user experience with PubNub’s real-time infrastructure

PubNub's infrastructure enabled Twingate to give their customers a smoother user experience with real-time updates and instant data synchronization. Because these instant server updates are accomplished without frequent polling, Twingate can experience these benefits without an inflated load on their servers while managing millions of users and updates without delays. 

Additionally, PubNub’s Presence feature has given Twingate real-time user tracking—allowing admins to instantly know when users are online, offline, or idle. 

With PubNub, Twingate has experienced steady growth and has not experienced any major outages. “That’s the key element that gives us the most confidence in PubNub,” says Sagie Shamay. PubNub has 99.999% uptime and 15 points-of-presence across the globe.

Scaling for the future with PubNub’s real-time features

With confidence in PubNub’s uptime and scalability, Twingate is prepared to meet increasing demands while delivering seamless, secure access to users worldwide.

If you’d also like to improve your users’ real-time experiences, contact us today to learn more and sign up for a free account to start developing something new!