Contractor & Vendor Temporary Access
Give Contractors Exactly the Access They Need, for Exactly as Long as They Need It
The Problem
Every mid-size company works with outside contractors, consultants, and vendors. The database admin who needs access to Postgres for an afternoon. The design agency that needs to review the staging environment for a week. The auditor who needs to access financial systems for a month. The standard process: create a VPN account, provision credentials, set a calendar reminder to revoke access when the engagement ends. In practice, the calendar reminder gets missed, the VPN account stays active, and six months later a forgotten contractor account becomes an entry point for attackers. Gartner estimates that 60% of organizations have experienced a security incident involving a third-party vendor. The root cause is almost always persistent access that outlived its purpose.
The Current Approach
How organizations typically handle contractor access: 1. **VPN account**: Create credentials, share them (often via email or Slack), set a reminder to revoke. Reminders get missed. Credentials persist. 2. **Shared credentials**: Give the contractor a team login. No individual attribution. No audit trail. No automatic expiration. 3. **Jump box / bastion host**: Better isolation, but the bastion itself is visible on the internet and requires credential management. 4. **Vendor-specific portals**: Custom-built access portals. Expensive to build and maintain. Still requires account lifecycle management.
The LayerV Solution
Create a qURL for the specific resource the contractor needs. Set the expiration to match the engagement — 4 hours for a quick fix, a week for a sprint, a month for an ongoing project. When the time expires, the qURL self-destructs and access is automatically revoked. No VPN account to create or forget to revoke. No credentials to share over Slack. No calendar reminder. The access is self-managing — it expires on its own. Each contractor gets their own qURL, tied to their identity (verified through your IdP or via email-restricted access policies). Every access attempt is logged with identity attribution. And the contractor only sees the specific resource you shared — not your network, not other services, not anything else. For vendors who need recurring access, generate a new qURL for each engagement. There is no standing access between engagements.
Key Benefits
Automatic expiration
Access self-destructs when the engagement ends. No credentials to revoke, no reminders to set.
Per-contractor attribution
Every contractor gets their own qURL. Full audit trail of who accessed what, when.
No VPN overhead
No VPN accounts to provision, manage, or decommission. Contractors access resources via browser.
Scoped to one resource
Contractors see only the specific resource you shared. No visibility into anything else.
Ideal For
- Companies working with IT contractors and managed service providers
- Organizations with external auditors requiring periodic system access
- Teams giving design and development agencies access to staging environments
- Healthcare organizations sharing system access with third-party specialists
- Any company tired of managing VPN accounts for external partners
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens when the engagement ends?
The qURL self-destructs at the expiration you set and access is revoked automatically. There is no VPN account to deprovision and no calendar reminder to miss.
Do contractors need to create accounts or install anything?
No. Contractors open the qURL in a browser. Identity is verified through your IdP or via email-restricted access policies — no VPN client, no new credentials to manage.
Can we audit what a contractor accessed?
Yes. Every access attempt is logged with identity attribution — who accessed what, when, and from where.
What can a contractor see beyond the shared resource?
Nothing. Each qURL is scoped to a single resource, so there is no network visibility and no lateral movement — the rest of your infrastructure stays invisible.