Enterprise network security has fragmented from a simple perimeter-defense model into a complex landscape of overlapping tools: traditional VPN, SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access), SD-WAN, and Cloud Security Gateways. For SMBs and mid-market companies that need enterprise-grade security without a multi-person security team to operate it, the challenge is finding a solution that's both effective and manageable. NordLayer, Perimeter 81 (now Check Point Harmony SASE), and Cloudflare One represent three distinct approaches to this problem.
NordLayer: Security-Focused, Team-Centric VPN
NordLayer (the B2B product from Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN) started as a straightforward business VPN and has evolved into a more complete network security platform. Key NordLayer capabilities:
- Dedicated servers and dedicated IPs: Teams can access company resources through fixed IP addresses that are whitelisted in cloud infrastructure, a common enterprise requirement for restricting database and application access.
- Device posture checks: NordLayer's 2025-launched Device Posture feature evaluates endpoint compliance before granting VPN access — OS version, antivirus status, and disk encryption.
- DNS filtering: Built-in threat protection that blocks known malicious domains at the DNS level, providing basic web security filtering without a separate secure web gateway product.
- Network segmentation: Virtual private gateways enable team-based access segmentation, so your marketing team can only reach marketing resources and your finance team can only reach financial systems — even on the same VPN.
Pricing: $9/user/month (Lite), $14/user/month (Core), $22/user/month (Premium).
Perimeter 81 / Check Point Harmony SASE
Perimeter 81 was acquired by Check Point Software in 2023 and rebranded as Check Point Harmony SASE. This acquisition has significantly expanded the platform's security depth — integrating Check Point's advanced threat prevention, URL filtering, and sandboxing capabilities into the clientless ZTNA and VPN infrastructure that Perimeter 81 built.
Harmony SASE combines VPN-as-a-Service, ZTNA, Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Firewall-as-a-Service in a single platform — the true SASE bundle that simplifies the security tool landscape. The integration of Check Point's ThreatCloud intelligence (tracking 3 billion threats daily) into network filtering is a genuine differentiator.
Pricing starts at $8/user/month for Essentials (minimum 10 users), with SASE bundles requiring custom quotes from sales.
Cloudflare One: The SASE Leader for Cloud-Native Teams
Cloudflare One is Cloudflare's complete SASE offering, built on Cloudflare's global network of 300+ data centers. For cloud-native organizations, it's the most compelling architecture: since Cloudflare's network is everywhere, the security processing happens close to users and resources regardless of geography, eliminating the latency penalty that backhauling traffic to a central inspection point introduces.
Cloudflare Access (ZTNA) is widely considered the best-in-class ZTNA implementation, with application-level access, identity-aware proxying, SSO integration, and audit logging. Cloudflare Tunnels allow exposing internal applications to Cloudflare Access without opening any inbound firewall ports — a genuinely elegant architecture for protecting on-premise applications.
Pricing: Free tier for up to 50 users. Cloudflare One Teams: $7/user/month. Enterprise: custom pricing.
Recommendation by Use Case
Choose NordLayer for SMBs of 10–100 users that need a manageable, cost-effective VPN with basic ZTNA features. Choose Harmony SASE for mid-market companies needing a complete SASE bundle with enterprise-grade threat prevention. Choose Cloudflare One for cloud-native, globally distributed companies that prioritize performance and the most mature ZTNA implementation.