strongDM Extends Access Management as Code Efforts

strongDM today announced it has added an application programming interface (API) and software development kits for Go, Java, Python, Ruby and other programming languages for involving the single sign-on (SSO) capabilities of its infrastructure access management platform, in addition to adding support for command-line interfaces (CLIs) exposed by cloud service providers.

At the same time, strongDM has integrated its namesake platform with third-party secrets management tools such as Vault from HashiCorp as well as platforms such as PagerDuty’s incident management platform and Slack messaging tools.

The access management platform can now also support any internal web applications and database platforms including DB2i, CitusDB, Oracle 11g, 12c, and 19c, Sybase ASE and IQ.

Finally, the company has made enhancements to existing protocols including Mongo Atlas, SSH certificate-based authentication and SSH port forwarding, and added support for Windows remote desktop protocol (RDP) network-level authentication (NLA) and integration with other SSO tools such as Auth0 and VMware Identity One.

Company CEO Elizabeth Zalman said strongDM, unlike other SSOs, is designed from the ground up to be incorporated within a developer’s workflow. The goal is to enable developers to manage access as code in the same way they manage infrastructure as code, she said.

In general, access management is usually the last stage of automation to be addressed by DevOps teams. However, with most DevOps teams now working from home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a sharp rise in the number of organizations seeking to automate access management as an alternative to managing virtual private networking (VPN) software, said Zalman.

Historically, many IT organizations have relied on Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to manage access. As an alternative, strongDM has been making a case for its platform since 2015. The company recently raised an additional $17 million in funding and claims to have more than 100 customers using its platform in production environments, including Peloton, SoFi and Betterment.

It’s unclear whether DevOps teams are extending their existing workflows to include access management. However, as DevOps teams grow weary of using custom scripts to extend those workflows, Zalman said eventually they’ll look for a more consistent approach to automating access management. A major factor in that decision is the fact that most employees won’t be coming back to the office in the same numbers they did prior to the pandemic, even after a vaccine is discovered and distributed.

At the same time, more DevOps teams are moving to embrace best DevSecOps practices, which inevitably will encompass access management. In fact, as part of that transition, it’s probable most DevOps teams will conclude the way access is currently managed is simply too antiquated to continue.