Perimeter 81

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of internal tools and IT person at a retail platform. We provide retailers the opportunity to reach users with publications and fliers. Users go into the app, put their postal code, get relevant information from their area, browse ads with the shopping list, and more.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perimeter 81?

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, we were suddenly working from home, and people needed to access secured company stuff. It had to remain inaccessible to the internet at large, so we needed a cloud-based VPN service. Our office eventually disappeared, so we couldn’t have our own hardware anymore.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Perimeter 81 provides a cloud-based VPN service. They didn’t have many service tiers, so we chose the plan that worked for us and went that way.

What is the team composition?

In the beginning, we spoke with 1–2 different people. Midway through the partnership, there was a change in the account manager. We’ve been in contact with around four people in total.

How did you come to work with Perimeter 81?

We just searched on IT message boards for VPN and cloud providers. After checking out websites, we contacted a few companies. Perimeter 81 offered an excellent web portal for managing and configuring the VPN. With the other services we tried, the configuration was nowhere near as comprehensive, or it was overly extensive. We could have complete control, but it was too complicated to set up and keep scalable and maintainable.

Once we got the calls going, we tried Perimeter 81’s service on a trial basis and found it an excellent fit. We went with them because they offered the best balance of everything.

How much have you invested with them?

We’re currently paying $6,000 per year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in January 2021, and it’s an ongoing project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

It’s difficult to put a solid number on it. The team that pulls the metadata from our clients’ websites felt the most significant impact because many of our clients’ websites have protections. Before, we just had clients add our office IP address to a list of IPs to allow us to pull data indiscriminately with no speed limits or throttling. When we started working from home, people were getting blocked for their home IP addresses.

The VPN has allowed us to tell our clients to add our VPN IP address to their list to avoid getting blocked. Now, our team can continue to work without issue.

How did Perimeter 81 perform from a project management standpoint?

The whole project is pretty hands-off for them. They just got us on the platform, and I’m the one managing the VPN. It’s just been a matter of adding users, so the project management is hard to gauge.

We communicate over email, Google Meet, or Zoom.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The combination of configurability while keeping it simple to use is outstanding. The other providers were far too granular or too barebones. Perimeter 81 strikes that beautiful balance between ease of use and configurability. It was the main reason why we chose them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

In terms of handling the project, I don’t think there’s much for them to do. However, it’d be nice if the service were a little more stable. Sometimes it can go up and down, and we’re not able to connect for 1–2 hours due to the problems on their servers. Their status page shows a bit more yellow and red than what we’d like, but thankfully, their outages or issues haven’t affected us much yet. Hopefully, they’ll work on it in the future.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I wouldn’t recommend it to a large enterprise due to the issues I mentioned. In our case, our employees use the VPN on an on-demand basis, so they aren’t permanently connected to it — that’s why we probably haven’t been affected by their server issues.

However, I’d definitely recommend Perimeter 81 for small or medium-sized businesses that need VPN services.