Prudencia Security is a full-suite Managed Service Provider (MSP) in the security industry with an eye for user-friendly solutions. Based in Sweden, they’ve teamed up with camera manufacturer, Axis Communications, to create custom applications for their surveillance equipment – none of which would be possible without Tailscale.
Max Remes, Head of IT Infrastructure, and Michael Jönsson, Security Specialist, join us to share how Tailscale laid the foundation for their products' effortless networking and makes their business possible.
How Prudencia fills a crucial need
“We are a full suite MSP, mainly focused on camera solutions,” explains Michael. “We're covering everything from fiber coming to the property, routers or firewalls, and switches. That includes the cameras, which are still our main objective.”
Prudencia builds custom applications for IT support and management on the cameras they install. These applications increase convenience and provide analytics to their customers, and building on Tailscale has significantly streamlined the process.
“We don't need expensive support contracts to have firewalls just for communication between the camera VPN and an alarm central or video management system,” Max explains, describing a core advantage of using Tailscale.
He also shares that in their region, security companies will provide equipment and expertise, but their IT competence can leave a lot to be desired. To solve this, Prudencia was founded to be an “IT company with security competence,” and their clients range from small businesses to the defense industry.
At the core of Prudencia’s business is a partnership with a camera manufacturing company, Axis Communications. They’re a well-respected provider of hardware in the security space, and the collaboration helps improve Axis’s offerings while expanding Prudencia's reach.
“Axis is one of the biggest camera companies in the world right now, and it's founded in Sweden as well,” Max explains. “We’re involved in research and development, and we build applications on top of their cameras. They're building great hardware in-house, and we build apps and have analytics.”
“Tailscale is a real enabler. It makes us extremely profitable. It's a unique selling point for us to provide the same solution as a dedicated firewall, which could take weeks and manual configuration for dedicated firewalls. But with Tailscale, I can literally do it in 30 seconds.”
Building for better management
Tailscale helped Prudencia’s teams speed up their processes and avoid extensive firewall configurations. For example, a traditional VPN used by several of Prudencia’s clients required considerable firewall configurations from their teams. This significantly slowed their productivity and added expensive management burdens.
Max shares, “Other traditional VPNs need to have all these preconditions before you can configure them. What's the current setup? Is it a public IP? You need to know all this, which could take weeks for a small customer. Good luck with that.”
These challenges inspired his team to search for a networking solution that would bypass the need for a dedicated firewall on every client’s site. “We really needed something to access those cameras for quick onboarding of the customer. We also needed to have those cameras feed into our data center so we could monitor and provide services immediately.”
Before finding Tailscale, one of the first solutions Prudencia tried only caused more headaches. Max shares, “The first one had a lot of firewalls to provide just a simple VPN tunnel to forward that traffic to our data center securely.”
However, since they’ve switched to Tailscale, operations have gone much more smoothly. Max adds, “In our data center, we now have Tailscale to build an overlay to access those cameras and those networks all across Sweden and Europe.”
Saving costs and effortless onboarding
Tailscale provides Prudencia with access via subnet routers. “It's a full mesh, so it's already enabled. I can see it come up in the admin portal. Then you can just access the network with a subnet router,” shares Max.
He explains that this drastically reduces the time for configuring cameras, which typically takes about a month. And since Prudencia currently serves over 30 sites this way, the cumulative time savings have been considerable.
“My time for onboarding for network communication, to get those camera feeds, is close to three to four minutes, compared to weeks. So, you can imagine the unique selling point for the customer. We can be up and running in under half a day, and everything is connected to our data centers. We can provide services straight away.”
Michael agrees and explains that he sees Tailscale as “an enabler” that unlocks Prudencia’s potential. For example, it helps them consolidate multiple users by remotely offloading GPU processing, so customers aren’t forced into a costly investment.
He explains, “Let's say you have a customer with 400-500 cameras, but they only need really detailed analytics on maybe two or three. The customer would need to invest €7,000 or dollars just to get the analytics on those three cameras. But with Tailscale, we could actually offer the same analytics for a tenth of the price because we could do it for 10 customers on the same GPU.”
This efficiency increases Prudencia’s potential to scale considerably, and Max echoes the sentiment. “Tailscale is a real enabler. It makes us extremely profitable,” he shares. “It's a unique selling point for us to provide the same solution as a dedicated firewall, which could take weeks and manual configuration for dedicated firewalls. But with Tailscale, I can literally do it in 30 seconds.”
Finally, the company’s camera feeds go to multiple data centers because they have clients throughout the Nordic region. Tailscale allows Prudencia to create direct, peer-to-peer connections, which have also saved the company considerable costs.
“Our camera feeds don't go to one big data center – they go to multiple,” shares Max. “Because Tailscale is point-to-point, it automatically ships the data and takes the closest path. Now, we can do everything device to device, which has saved us around 40% of the communications cost on each site that we have. This is tremendous because we're past a startup company now. We're a scale-up company.”
Secure networking without compromise
Tailscale has also helped Prudencia meet the high standard for security demanded by its industry. Specific frameworks, like the ISO 27001, are built on identity-based, least privilege access control, which Tailscale is designed to facilitate.
Max explains, “If you're not doing advanced SD-WAN, identity isn't a feature that comes along with a lot of firewalls that we have worked with. And that's something that’s already built into the product with Tailscale.”
Prudencia also uses ACLs to granularly manage who has access to what. If a computer at a convenience store gets compromised, there are additional protections controlling who gets access to what. “It's encrypted, but who can access it?” he asks. “We built ACLs all across our network for people to only access what they're doing, so our entire tailnet is built on least privilege.”
Max and Michael emphasize that Tailscale is designed to help teams meet the highest security standards. Not only does it drastically outcompete the firewalls Max’s team has encountered, but it’s also empowering their move toward zero trust. Max calls Tailscale “a top zero-trust platform,” adding, “That's something that's a real selling point for us and our customers. It's not just a full mesh network.”
Convenient and versatile networking
The impact Tailscale has had on Prudencia’s customers has been profound. It gives them reliable, 24/7 access to the applications and analytics they need. This provides invaluable peace of mind, particularly in sensitive and high-risk environments.
“These business owners live and breathe their company,” explains Michael. “Now they can look at their store before going to bed and when they wake up. They can calm down, because now they have this sense of control.”
Max expands on this, adding, “Tailscale’s ease of use and how we're building on top of it really gives ease of mind to the end customers. They have access to their store – it could be a retailer, convenience store, or anything else. We're adding access to their own systems: doors, gates, alarms, and cameras. That's built on top of Tailscale, securely.”
However, Prudencia doesn’t just support conventional businesses. Some of their clients have unique needs, serving organizations running high-risk operations where timeliness is crucial. “We work with some special customers who have some serious problems here in Sweden,” adds Michael. “To deploy a camera quickly, I can configure it at home, get it to work, and then it takes me a maximum of five minutes to deploy it into the environment.”
Built for ease of use
According to Max, Tailscale's ease of use and ability to function as a low-management VPN are two of its biggest strengths. “Tailscale is, at the bottom line, a really user-friendly VPN,” he shares. “That's how we're using it – as a full mesh to access all the services that we need and for connecting those services to each other.”
Max also praises Tailscale’s usability and appreciates how it adapts to devices added to a tailnet by automatically connecting additional services or applications. He credits the platform with keeping costs low and being built with users in mind.
“It's 99% because of how Tailscale is built and the low cost of deploying new services – for both our customers and internal teams,” he shares. “It’s fast, money-saving, efficient, and secure, and we’re saving hundreds of configuration hours in the firewall environments that we work in.”
Upgrade to Tailscale
Prudencia works in a sensitive industry, so when they began building the networking foundation of their business, they knew that compromise wasn’t an option.
Whether your business supports convenience stores or offices, Tailscale can provide you with dependable networking that saves hours of labor, reduces costs, and ends management hassles.
Discover how it can support your business by chatting with our team today.
