Customer Connect overview
Customer Connect is the NetFoundry console for delivering zero trust network access as a managed service. A service provider uses it to onboard customers, deploy the software that carries their traffic, and define exactly which resources each customer can reach, without VPNs, public IP addresses, or open inbound firewall ports.
Access is granted per application and per identity. Nothing is reachable until a policy explicitly connects a source to a destination, so there is no implicit trust and no lateral movement across the network.
Operators and members
Customer Connect is built around two organizations: a provider operates the platform, and customers are the organizations it serves. To learn more about both terms, see Key concepts.
The people divide differently from the organizations, and this is the part that most often trips readers up. Almost everyone who administers Customer Connect works for the provider. Provider Admin, Customer Admin and Location Admin are all provider staff — they are the same job at three different scopes:
| Role | Works for | Can reach |
|---|---|---|
| Provider Admin | the provider | the whole provider — every customer, location and connector |
| Customer Admin | the provider | one customer and everything beneath it |
| Location Admin | the provider | one location and everything beneath it |
| Member | the customer | the resources they have been granted, to use rather than administer |
A Customer Admin is not "the customer's administrator" — it is a provider employee whose authority has been narrowed to a single customer, typically the person who looks after that account.
Member is the only role held by someone outside the provider: an employee of the provider's end customer, who connects to the applications made available to them. Members get
read, connectivity and enroll — enough to use the network, never to change its shape. The role can be granted on a customer or a location, but never provider-wide.
The codebase names this split directly: Admin and Read-Only make up the operator population, Member the member population, and the two are disjoint. That is what the
/operators and /members listings on each resource separate, and what an identity's operator scope tag records.
Core building blocks
Every deployment is made of five resources: locations, connectors, applications, connector models, and access policies.
Common roles
- Provider Admin — provider staff operating the platform. Creates customers, defines connector models and templates, deploys provider-owned infrastructure, authors access policies at any scope, manages operators and branding, and monitors the entire network. Can preview a customer's experience.
- Customer Admin — provider staff scoped to one customer: its locations, connectors, access policies, members and branding, plus monitoring of those resources.
- Location Admin — provider staff scoped to one location and the connectors and applications beneath it.
- Read-Only — the same three scopes without the ability to change anything: for watching status, activity and alerts.
- Member — an employee of the end customer, who uses the access granted to them rather than administering it.
See Key concepts for the full vocabulary, then follow the Get started guide.