How a Global E-Commerce Leader Boosts Operational Efficiency with StrongDM

Expansion in Focus: Upgrading PAM to Fuel Growth

A global digital retail and e-commerce technology leader, operating more than 40 brands across cosmetics, dietary supplements, and luxury goods, needed to modernize its privileged access management (PAM) to support its global scale. With critical data centers across Europe—and more than 30 sites globally—the company’s infrastructure required a scalable and efficient solution.

Initially reliant on a homegrown tool that only supported SQL Servers, the organization faced limitations in scaling and adapting to a growing variety of databases. Rather than investing significant resources into expanding the legacy system, the company chose StrongDM to centralize access management and reduce technical team overhead.

“We had an old elevation tool, which was legacy code and not manageable. StrongDM is cleaner, nicer, and easy to manage as well… We've got developers recommending it [StrongDM] to other developers, so that says something about it…”

- Senior DBA

Efficiency Gains from Day One

Agility and operational efficiency were essential to the company’s success. With just six engineers managing a global database estate, expectations around responsiveness and delivery speed were high. The organization sought a secure and dynamic PAM solution to streamline access requests at scale.

After evaluating multiple options, they selected StrongDM for its intuitive design and operational impact. Within months of implementation, StrongDM significantly reduced time and resources spent on managing access.

Enhancing Security with Just-In-Time Access

The company implements role-based access control (RBAC) across three teams and multiple environments, including production and dev/test. Permissions are tiered—read-only, read-write, and admin—ensuring users receive only the access necessary for their roles.

With StrongDM, Access Workflows enable Just-in-Time access, requiring users to provide justification for temporary elevated privileges. This feature supports the company’s change management process while delivering full visibility into access activity through comprehensive logging.

Reducing Audit Prep from a Week to Minutes

Prior to StrongDM, compliance audits were labor-intensive, requiring a DBA to be removed from core development work for up to a week for each audit. The manual nature of evidence collection cost the team around 40 hours per audit.

Now, StrongDM’s centralized audit trails drastically simplify compliance tasks—saving time, ensuring accuracy, and supporting adherence to frameworks like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.

Why StrongDM Won the Technical Evaluation

The engineering team needed a solution that could go beyond SQL Servers—one that could scale privilege escalation and access management across an evolving technology stack. While other PAM vendors were considered, StrongDM’s breadth of capabilities, combined with ease of implementation and low dev overhead, made it the clear winner.

“After completing the RFP with other solutions, I thought StrongDM was very intuitive. It was very simple to use. You could bake a lot of complexity into it, but it was fairly simple to do, and there are levels of granularity in terms of access control. It was just an easy product to implement out of the box. And there wasn't a massive amount of dev effort or overhead to get value from it.”

- Head of Business Intelligence and Database Solutions

Looking Ahead

By implementing StrongDM, the company has successfully reduced operational costs, streamlined access across a complex global stack, and improved its security posture. As the organization continues its growth trajectory, it plans to expand its use of StrongDM’s features to further enhance its technology and security landscape.

Discover how StrongDM can transform your organization's access management, ensuring security, efficiency, and scalability. Book a demo.