Seismic Centralizes Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Access and Accelerates Growth with StrongDM

Seismic, the global leader in enablement, helps organizations engage customers, enable teams, and ignite revenue growth. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™️ is the most powerful, unified enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. 

Enterprise Acquisitions Introduce Cloud Confusion

From 2019-2021 Seismic experienced exponential growth driven both organically by existing and new customer usage as well as inorganic growth -  through strategic business acquisitions. Some of the growing pains they experienced during this time included the fragmentation and expansion of tools, policies, and environments. Each acquisition introduced a new cloud provider, making standardization of access controls and policy management a challenge. 

Operating in four different clouds (IBM, Azure, AWS, and GCP) introduced significant hurdles in managing access to its diverse infrastructure. Each cloud provider had its specific access management approach, lacking a centralized method to oversee and control permissions. The complexity intensified due to non-standardized permissions across clouds, making it difficult to manage and tailor access to specific groups.

The Need for a Unified RBAC Solution

This complexity prompted the Engineering team to initiate a comprehensive two-year strategy for consolidating and unifying their various environments, with a key focus on finding a more unified Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) solution. The Engineering team recognized the urgent need for more granular controls, particularly in the face of strict security requirements from their customers. The challenges included managing permissions across different clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure), technologies (MS SQL Server, Azure SQL, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, Kubernetes, etc.), and diverse data store types. The strategy ultimately led Seismic to StrongDM.

Infrastructure Access Centralization and Automation

StrongDM proved to be a game-changer for Seismic, offering secure, centralized, infrastructure access management across its multi-cloud environment. The implementation of StrongDM allowed Seismic to automate access requests and initiate Just-in-Time Access, ensuring that the right individuals received the right access only when needed. This shift helped Seismic achieve the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) across all of its critical infrastructure.

Positive User Experience and Collaborative Support

While acknowledging the inevitable initial friction with any change, Seismic found that StrongDM's user-friendly interface and support team made the adoption process smooth and painless. The engagement with StrongDM's support team stood out as one of the best experiences among the various vendors Seismic has interacted with. The ability to work closely with StrongDM engineers to address specific issues, especially in dealing with less mature technologies, reinforced the partnership.

Access Granted in Minutes—Not Days

Seismic even quantified the impact of StrongDM on access management efficiency. Before StrongDM, it could take days to receive access to resources, leading to inefficiencies, user frustration, and manual overhead. 

Ian Miller, Principal Site Reliability Engineer, gave this example,

“If you have requested access to one service database and that service was deployed in every region that we support, that could easily mean up to 18 different databases for that service and production. So it wasn't always a one-to-one representation in terms of what you got access to. It was hard to keep track of, it was hard to maintain, and it wasn't always clear what that person always had access to.”

With StrongDM, the time required for the same process is reduced drastically – down to a matter of minutes. The automation of access requests for resources in AWS and other clouds, especially during onboarding, played a pivotal role in Seismic's ability to scale rapidly and efficiently.

“...Getting us to a place where we could have Just-in-Time, Least Privileged Access [made all the difference], we really couldn't do it without a solution like StrongDM.”

- Tom Wojtalewicz, Senior Manager Site Reliability Engineering

Efficient Access Controls with Zero Security Compromises

As a scaling enterprise, Seismic hosts thousands of customers with strict security and compliance requirements. As an organization, they also operate within compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. By leveraging StrongDM's audit logs and session recordings, Seismic's InfoSec, Security, and Privacy teams could also efficiently collaborate in auditing and ensure compliance.

“Remaining in compliance and auditing is another benefit. We are able to share data from StrongDM with auditors and show that we have temporary access within our defined limits, with the ability to get more granular by defining roles by geography... Showing that people from this location aren't accessing data from another location.”

- Tom Wojtalewicz, Senior Manager Site Reliability Engineering

Secure Infrastructure Access: A Firm Foundation for Growth

Seismic faced access challenges from acquisitions and diverse cloud environments which included AWS, GCP and Azure. StrongDM played a pivotal role in automating access management, unifying controls across all cloud infrastructure, and meeting compliance standards. Seismic's adoption of StrongDM has not only addressed immediate access management challenges but has also positioned the organization for sustained growth, scalability, and enhanced security in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

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