How a Web Hosting Company With 1,200 Employees Across 51 Countries Onboarded Its Entire Remote Workforce to a New VPN Overnight
The Challenge
Hostinger — a global web hosting provider serving 1.2 million customers across 51 countries — had built its internal network infrastructure for an office-based operating model. When COVID-19 lockdowns forced the entire 1,200-person workforce to remote work overnight, the existing VPN infrastructure immediately failed to scale. The legacy solution had not been designed for distributed, cross-border connections at this volume and could not reliably maintain access across different countries. Critically, it lacked role-based network access controls — meaning the firm could not enforce granular access permissions as employees connected from dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously. Operational continuity was at immediate risk, and the firm needed a replacement that could be deployed to the entire global workforce faster than any traditional procurement or deployment cycle would allow.
The Solution
Hostinger replaced its legacy VPN with NordLayer's cloud-based network security platform, selected as the most cost-effective and easiest-to-manage option from a shortlisted set of solutions. NordLayer deployed 10 private virtual gateways to support the global workforce, with role-based access controls enabling the cybersecurity team to manage permissions for employees connecting from 51 countries. The cloud-native architecture eliminated the need for Hostinger to maintain on-premises VPN server infrastructure — transferring maintenance responsibility to the provider and freeing the internal team for other security priorities. The entire global workforce was onboarded overnight.
The Outcome
Hostinger's global remote workforce of more than 1,000 employees was onboarded to NordLayer overnight during the COVID-19 lockdown — preserving operational continuity through an unprecedented transition. The deployment covers employees across 51 countries through 10 private virtual gateways. A 5-person cybersecurity team manages the entire NordLayer deployment, including access control, gateway management, and ongoing maintenance — work that would have required significantly larger headcount on an on-premises VPN infrastructure. All 1,000+ employees use NordLayer daily in the current hybrid working model, and the IT team's bandwidth has been redirected from VPN maintenance to higher-value security projects.
Strategic Takeaway
Hostinger's overnight migration is an extreme case of what cloud-native network security enables that on-premises infrastructure cannot: instant global scale without procurement cycles or hardware deployment. A legacy VPN infrastructure would have required weeks or months to expand to support a sudden transition to full remote work across 51 countries — and during that time, the firm's 1,200 employees would have been unable to work securely. The 5-person team managing the global deployment is the efficiency signal: on-premises VPN infrastructure at this scale typically requires dedicated infrastructure teams, whereas cloud-native management collapses that headcount requirement dramatically. For fast-growing web infrastructure companies where the workforce expands internationally faster than IT capacity can build out, cloud-native network security is the only model that scales without creating a security debt that compounds with each new geography.
- Cloud-native VPN infrastructure eliminates the procurement and deployment bottleneck that makes legacy VPN unresponsive to rapid workforce changes — what would have taken weeks to scale was done overnight.
- Role-based access controls become essential — not optional — when employees connect from dozens of jurisdictions: granular access management is the security mechanism that prevents a global workforce from creating a flat, uncontrolled network.
- A 5-person team managing 1,000+ employees across 51 countries is the efficiency case for cloud-native security: the provider handles infrastructure maintenance, freeing internal IT capacity for security strategy rather than server administration.
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