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What is Access Gate? It controls who reaches each machine.

Access Gate is Trout Software's agentless, on-premise Zero Trust overlay for OT. It makes your plants secure and audit-ready now, without downtime. Then it gives your OT teams simple services they want to use.

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The short answer

Access Gate is an agentless, on-premise Zero Trust overlay for operational technology (OT) networks, built by Trout Software. It plugs into the existing network.

Across IT, OT, and IoT, it enforces:

  • identity-bound access
  • microsegmentation
  • network-layer MFA
  • tamper-evident audit

It works without installing agents on the equipment, without rewiring the network, and without stopping production.

Who builds it

Trout Software builds Access Gate.

Trout Software is a cybersecurity company founded in 2022, with offices in Kingston (New York), Paris and Dublin. It builds Access Gate to bring Zero Trust to critical infrastructure and industry. It serves operators whose legacy OT cannot support agent-based security: water and wastewater utilities, electric utilities, defense manufacturers and other industrial plants.

Layer 1, today

Secure your machines now, without downtime.

The first job cannot wait: securing operational technology (OT). That means PLCs, HMIs, sensors, plant desktops, on-premise file servers and every machine that runs the operations. Most of them are legacy. You cannot install a security agent on them or take them offline to reconfigure them.

Trout Access Gate installs as an appliance, on site, and connects to your existing network. From day one it delivers the controls audits ask for, without touching the machines: visibility, access control, identity, logging and encryption. It runs industrial proxies at scale. The security agent moves off the machine you cannot touch and onto a proxy in front of it. The proxies are inserted without downtime. See agentless Zero Trust for OT.

See every machine.

Passive discovery maps every OT, IT and IoT machine, including legacy PLCs and HMIs. It never probes fragile equipment.

Control who reaches what.

Microsegmentation runs as an overlay: logical enclaves with precise flow rules. No VLAN redesign, no recabling.

Tie every connection to a person.

Every connection belongs to a person or a service. MFA is enforced at the network layer, even for machines that cannot authenticate on their own.

Prove every audit.

Tamper-evident record of every session for SIEM, incident response, and CMMC, NERC CIP, and DOH/DEC evidence.

Layer 2, next

The same overlay then runs services OT teams want.

Once the secure fabric is in place, the same overlay delivers simple services. OT teams use them because they make the daily work easier. Security becomes a help instead of a tax.

Secure remote access

Identity-bound, MFA-protected, session-recorded access for operators and vendors. Works with your VPN or 4G link, with no exposed jump hosts.

Protocol gateways

Safe bridges between zones and protocols, so systems that must talk can, through a controlled and logged path.

DNS and time

Trusted internal name resolution and time sync without exposing OT to the internet.

File sharing

Move files in and out of the OT zone safely, with every transfer attributed and logged.

Historian access

Expose operational data to IT, analytics, or cloud without giving anyone a path to the controllers.

Safe updates

Deliver patches and updates to OT through a single controlled channel, on your schedule.

Questions

Common questions about Access Gate.

Access Gate is an agentless, on-premise Zero Trust overlay for operational technology (OT) networks, built by Trout Software. It connects to your existing network. It enforces identity-bound access, microsegmentation, network-layer MFA and tamper-evident audit across IT, OT and IoT machines. Nothing is installed on the equipment, nothing is rewired, and production keeps running. It ships as an appliance or a virtualized network function running Trout CyberOS.

Trout Software is a cybersecurity company founded in 2022, with offices in Kingston (New York), Paris and Dublin. It builds Access Gate to bring Zero Trust to critical infrastructure and industry. It serves operators whose legacy OT cannot support agent-based security: water and wastewater utilities, electric utilities, defense manufacturers and other industrial plants.

Those platforms are mainly passive OT monitoring tools. They detect and alert, but they do not enforce access. Access Gate enforces. It connects to your existing network as an overlay. At the network layer, it controls who and what can reach each machine, on which protocols and when. It records every session. Unlike agent-based and cloud security tools, it needs no software on the protected equipment. That matters for legacy PLCs, HMIs and SCADA that cannot run agents.

No. Access Gate is agentless. It connects to your existing network as an overlay, beside it. There are no agents on PLCs, HMIs, or SCADA servers, no VLAN renumbering, no recabling, and no maintenance window. Operations continue uninterrupted during and after deployment.

Access Gate provides access control, segmentation, MFA, monitoring and audit evidence. Those are the controls required by CMMC (Levels 1 and 2), NERC CIP for electric utilities, the New York DOH and DEC water and wastewater rules, and IEC 62443 zones and conduits. It also maps to NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST SP 800-82 for industrial environments.

Access Gate connects to your existing network as an overlay and is installed in a day. A typical deployment maps the network and its assets, defines the enclaves and access rules, then hardens progressively. Nothing is installed on the protected equipment and no rewiring is required, so production keeps running throughout.

Access Gate is sold as an all-inclusive annual subscription covering hardware, software, updates, and support, with no per-seat fees. Access Gate Essential is the model for small and mid-size sites; Access Gate Performance covers plants, control centers and large estates. Current list prices are on the pricing page.

Access Gate works in two layers. First, it solves the immediate security and compliance problem: visibility, identity-bound access, microsegmentation and audit. It deploys as an overlay, with no agents and no downtime. Then the same fabric runs simple secure services that OT teams use: secure remote access, protocol gateways, DNS and time, file sharing, historian access and safe updates. Security becomes a help instead of a tax, and that is what gets OT teams to engage.

Start with the gate, then add services on the same appliance.

See Access Gate on your network.

A short walkthrough shows how the overlay secures your machines without touching them.