MaintainX helps industrial and frontline teams manage work orders, maintenance, inspections, and more with their maintenance and work execution software. As a mobile-first platform and cloud-first company, staying connected has been integral to their success. Unfortunately, their original approach to networking slowed their team, wasted resources, and caused endless headaches for their IT team.

We heard from Joseph Gad, IT Team Lead at MaintainX, and Francis Blanchard, Director of Security & IT at MaintainX, about how Tailscale eliminated these challenges, saving their staff time, costs, and endless management struggles.

Revolutionizing frontline workflows

MaintainX is a SaaS platform that supports the workflows of frontline workers in industrial maintenance operations. Their software is user-friendly, fast, and built with workers, not just managers, in mind. As Joseph explains, “Our focus on real-time updates, ease of use, and deep configurability sets us apart in the market.”

Since its founding in 2018, they’ve seen considerable growth in demand and expanded their staff, which made lackluster networking an even greater obstacle. Francis shares, “We currently have over 600 employees, most of whom are either remote or hybrid across our three office locations.”

Clunky solutions and a VPN nightmare

Before Tailscale, MaintainX used OpenVPN in a mix of traditional VPN services and jump boxes that proved to be unstable. According to Joseph, their tech stack was buggy, required significant maintenance, and often impeded work instead of facilitating it.

He explains, “OpenVPN was a pretty big nightmare because it was very sluggish and not agile. Anytime we had to jump in, it could take me up to 15 minutes just to run a password reset. It was that slow.”

MaintainX also struggled with “clunky authentication.” Staff members would be locked out of their admin consoles, and there were no logs or explanations of the changes.

Joseph shares, “A lot of our users had their permissions changed. Admins’ accounts were turned into simple user profiles. We had no logs of what could have happened.”

Since these issues negatively impacted MantainX’s business, staff, and customers, Joseph’s team began to consider other solutions. “It was maybe a month or two before we started exploring WireGuard-based VPNs,” he shares.

Vetting the smarter way to network

“We estimate it saves five to ten hours per week in operational overhead, whether it's on provisioning access, troubleshooting VPN issues, or configuring routes. It's also helped us to avoid spending thousands of dollars on infrastructure complexity from setting up and managing a traditional VPN stack.”

Before he brought Tailscale to MaintainX, Joseph was already familiar with its capabilities. WireGuard-based VPNs had been growing in popularity, and he’d been following Tailscale and its community before using it for his home networking.

He explains, “I used Tailscale while messing around with my home lab, using it for personal projects and getting easy remote access when I was away from home.” So, when staff at MaintainX began to struggle with their networking, he pitched Tailscale as a potential solution.

“We did look at alternatives, but the big win with Tailscale was the fact that the update process was automated. We wouldn’t have to deploy updates to our MDM solutions each time. So, that was that.” From there, his team focused on testing Tailscale’s capabilities. This involved working with MaintainX’s DevOps team to create test environments and assess potential solutions.

“It was just a matter of testing a few things because of my personal knowledge of the product,” he shares. “I started working closely with our DevOps teams to create some test environments. We also collaborated with our engineering and sales teams because they had members who needed to access these environments. We wanted to ensure functionality and operational coverage.”

Bringing Tailscale to MaintainX

Once Joseph’s IT team confirmed that Tailscale could meet MaintainX’s networking needs, they brought it on board. He cites Tailscale’s ease of deployment as one of his favorite benefits. “The setup takes minutes, and scaling is zero-maintenance. There are no concentrators, no NAT headaches, and no config drift.”

At MaintainX, the staff members who use Tailscale the most work on the engineering, security, and sales teams. As Joseph explains, “Engineers use it to connect to test infrastructure and internal tooling services. The sales team uses it to access our sandbox environment for demonstration purposes.”

Francis also describes their environment as cloud-first on AWS, so the speed and reliability of Tailscale have been crucial for keeping teams connected. “We’re entirely cloud-native, but our stack is fairly heterogeneous,” he shares. “We use a variety of platforms and internal admin tools, many of which are deployed in isolated VPCs or hosted on private subnets.”

Access controls and better performance

Since adopting Tailscale, MaintainX has benefited from several of Tailscale’s capabilities. ACLs have helped them narrowly define access between users and services. “ACLs are great,” shares Joseph.

They’ve also seen a significant improvement in functionality and agility.

“Tailscale is much more agile,” shares Joseph. “In terms of functionality and administration, we have SCIM set up. It works very smoothly because of the automation that we have put in place with our identity provider, data platform, and Google Workspace.”

These improvements have generated quantifiable savings in costs and labor.

Francis explains, “We estimate it saves five to ten hours per week in operational overhead, whether it's on provisioning access, troubleshooting VPN issues, or configuring routes. It's also helped us to avoid spending thousands of dollars on infrastructure complexity from setting up and managing a traditional VPN stack.”

Set it and forget it

“We have so much automation for user provisioning and access, we can just sign in with Google and not worry about having to provision anyone,” shares Joseph. With this system, Tailscale has allowed MaintainX to streamline onboarding without more hassles for their IT team or new users.

“We tell everyone upon their start date, ‘This is the software to access our internal tooling,” explains Joseph. “Just use 'Sign in with Google,' and you're in. If there's any other issue, let us know—but there often isn't.”

So far, Joseph’s team has been ecstatic with Tailscale’s performance. When asked what has helped them the most, he shares that “developers get secure access to what they need without jumping through hoops. There’s been a security posture improvement, simplified policy enforcement, and more auditability and visibility.”

He also reports almost no issues with maintenance, especially compared to the numerous bugs that came with their previous solution. Tailscale’s ease of use and functionality have made seeking technical support virtually unnecessary.

“I was going to jump on a call with our Tailscale representative to discuss our contract, and I said, ‘I'm going to be honest. I have nothing to say when it comes to dealing with problems. I very rarely access the admin console since we’ve organized our ACLs and completed the setup. It just works. It's set it and forget it. Tailscale has been pretty impeccable so far.”

Get bad networking out of your team’s way

Since adopting Tailscale, MaintainX has gained fast, secure, and low-maintenance networking that continues to save them time and resources. If your team is interested in a nearly effortless networking solution, contact our team for a demo today.