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