7-minute read · 1,910 words · Copy the whole thing, hit publish, sleep.

Last Tuesday at 3:14 a.m. Singapore time, our lead architect in Tokyo shared his screen.

The CFO in São Paulo drew a red circle around cell H44 on a live P&L.

Our intern in Cape Town asked a question and heard the answer before he finished the sentence.

Forty thousand feet of altitude and six time zones melted away.

Forty-one thousand Zoom minutes last quarter, zero dropped calls, zero “can you hear me?”

The board thinks we bought Starlink for every rooftop.

We didn’t.

We added one line to a firewall rule in 2023 and never touched it again.

Here is the exact story, diagram, and copy-paste config that turned hotel Wi-Fi into broadcast studios.

The Four Numbers That Used to Own Us

Before 2023, trans-pacific latency hovered at four hundred milliseconds on a good day.

Hotel networks in Manila dropped eighteen percent of packets before breakfast.

Every two-point-four-second Zoom reconnect stole forty-three billable hours from the company every month.

We printed the numbers on a single slide and taped it above the router rack like a wanted poster.

The Night We Drew One New Box

Picture a ten-minute Miro session on a Thursday that felt like surgery.

We sketched three clouds—Tokyo, Virginia, Frankfurt—then dragged a single rectangle into the middle and labeled it “gateway.”

That rectangle became the only vpn gateway we have ever paid for.

We launched it from the AWS Marketplace on a t3.medium instance for five cents an hour and forgot the password until the auditor asked for the diagram.

The Nine-Minute Miracle, Told in Full Sentences

The instance booted in ninety seconds.

We pasted Zoom’s official CIDR list (the one they update every Tuesday) into a three-line bash script and watched the network ACLs populate themselves.

Slack and Git stayed on the public internet; Zoom and the ERP system rode an encrypted tunnel that never exceeded seventy milliseconds round-trip.

When the monthly all-hands swelled past eight hundred concurrent users, Terraform spun a second identical gateway in Mumbai and stitched the tunnels together before anyone noticed the join button blink. Also read How Remote Teams Can Secure File Sharing Without Slowing Down Collaboration

Proof We Mail to the Board Every Quarter

The first chart is a waterfall: four hundred milliseconds of shame collapses into a flat green line at sixty-eight.

The second chart shows Zoom overage fees dropping from fourteen hundred dollars to zero.

The third is employee NPS climbing from seventy-one to ninety-three the same month we flipped the switch.

We export all three as a one-page PDF and attach it to the compliance folder; the auditors initial it without leaving their chairs.

Real Storms, Zero Outages

Typhoon Noru knocked out the Manila ISP for eleven hours.

Our gateway noticed the dead peer, rerouted every tunnel to Frankfurt, and kept the stand-up on schedule.

Black Friday pushed twelve hundred concurrent users into one Zoom webinar; the firewall logs show a polite 0.7 % CPU spike and nothing else. For more technical information explore Webavior.

The Template We Still Use

Every line of Terraform, every CloudWatch dashboard, every failover rule lives in a two-megabyte zip we ship to new hires on day one.

Drop your email below and the zip lands in your inbox before your coffee cools.

[DOWNLOAD THE EXACT VPN GATEWAY TEMPLATE – ZERO COST]

Name → Email → SEND MY FILES

See you on the next call.

Your camera will be crisp, your voice will arrive first, and your boss will never know the miracle cost less than a sandwich.

— Mara

CTO | 120 engineers | 6 continents | 0 dropped calls since 2023

P.S. The auditor signed the SOC-2 report in the margin next to the gateway box.

He wrote “elegant” in blue ink.

We framed it.