Cloud Secure Link

Cloud Secure Link (CSL) accelerates an organization's network integration strategy, removing external attack vectors and replacing rigid perimeter security without requiring complex network re-architecting. By centralizing connection management directly within Appian, it provides a flexible, infrastructure-agnostic foundation for enterprise workflows.

The CSL Beta Program ran for 5 months from February to July 2026, which allowed 3 financial services organizations and an Appian Partner to assess CSL as a major security and architectural improvement over traditional VPN connectivity.

Beta Program Findings

• CSL’s strong security posture was noted by all beta participants. Basic vulnerability scanning of the CSL client by one participant returned 0 vulnerabilities since the client does not expose external inbound network ports. 
• All beta participants found establishing connectivity over Cloud Secure Link to be quick and simple. One participant noted that Cloud Secure Link took less than 5 hours to configure connectivity end-to-end, whereas PrivateLink took over 9 hours to set up. This same participant also implemented extra software layers by deploying Cloud Secure Link in a Kubernetes cluster. 
  • This is now the recommended deployment pattern as of Appian 26.7, so we anticipate that GA adopters will experience even faster setup times using the new self-service configuration UI. 
• Participants found that scaling their connectivity to support multiple APIs was simpler to achieve than for our other connectivity offerings due to the speed and simplicity of adding new connections. We anticipate that GA adopters will scale their connectivity even faster using the self-service configuration UI. 
• Participants noted that, similar to VPN, Cloud Secure Link introduces some latency to connections compared to standard TLS-encrypted public internet traffic. One participant noted that requests generally incurred an approximately 100ms delay. However, beta testing did not reveal a difference in speed between VPN and Cloud Secure Link connectivity. Appian aims to load test Cloud Secure Link so that we can better understand its limits and capabilities.

Here are some of the things beta participants had to say:

"The implementation of the Cloud Secure Link agent was very, very easy—it started working immediately. With a single agent, we can connect both ways to databases and web APIs to build a data fabric for AI agents. We think CSL will be the perfect tool for our customers."

David Fernandez Castro, Inetum, CTO
 

“Our testing was successful with multiple APIs using the same CSL tunnel. Debugging on CSL is straightforward, and making updates or redeploying containers is a very quick process.”

Financial Services Customer, North America
 

Future Product Enhancements

• Highly available connection configuration
• Expanded workload support — Log streaming, Autoscale etc.
• Support for new Appian Cloud regions such as Osaka
• Compliance uplift — Support for GovCloud, PCI, Cyber Essentials Plus, Canada Protected B
• Inbound connectivity — Site access and Enhanced Data Pipeline

Using CSL

CSL was made generally available with the Appian 26.7 release on July 31, 2026 to customers on the Advanced and Premium tier. Qualified customers and partners may submit a support case to obtain access.