strongDM Unveils Major Update to Leading Cloud Infrastructure Access Platform

Burlingame, CA -- November 16, 2020 -- strongDM, the single-sign-on (SSO) company for backend infrastructure access, announced that its platform now secures access to every class of tool that technical staff use in their day-to-day routine. 

As teams cope with a fully remote workforce, companies require a solution to provide comprehensive access controls in a way that doesn’t disrupt developer productivity. strongDM was designed from day one to seamlessly integrate with the modern developer workflow, by extending the DevOps mantra of infrastructure-as-code to include access-as-code as well. For the first time, the more secure way to grant access is also the more convenient way to receive access. 

“Just like AWS for compute power, and Kubernetes for container orchestration, strongDM is the gold standard for access and auditing,” said Drew Blas, Director, Internal Engineering at Betterment. “Developers won’t tolerate tools that slow them down or force them to use substandard workflows. strongDM is the only security product that actually makes their lives easier.”

strongDM was created in 2015 to securely manage and audit access to databases in all environments, cloud and on-premise alike. Over the past two years, the company aggressively expanded support to include more database management systems, SSH (Linux servers), RDP (Windows servers), and kubectl (Kubernetes clusters).

Today, in its new release, strongDM also announces support for:

• Delegation of credentials to 3rd-party vaults, including HashiCorp’s Vault
• The clouds themselves, including the AWS CLI
• Any internal web application, such as the company intranet, customer service portal, Jira, Jenkins, or Redash
• More database management systems, including DB2i, CitusDB, Oracle 11g, 12c, and 19c, Sybase ASE and IQ
• Just-in-time permissioning with PagerDuty and Slack connectivity
• A robust API with SDKs to support automation across Go, Java, Python, Ruby, and other preferred languages
• Enhancements to existing protocols including Mongo Atlas, SSH certificate-based authentication and SSH port forwarding, plus the automatic detection and support of Windows RDP NLA
• More SSOs including Auth0 and VMWare Identity One
  

strongDM is the only comprehensive access and auditing solution for any infrastructure asset technical staff reach for,” said Elizabeth Zalman, CEO of strongDM. “Just as SSOs solved end-user access to web applications, there is now a comparable solution that enables DevOps teams to securely provide access to any employee who needs access.”

How strongDM Works

strongDM is a proxy that manages and audits access to any back-end infrastructure. Admins define role-based access controls across all infrastructure, and users get one-click access that requires zero changes to workflow. Additionally, strongDM provides all the audit evidence that admins ever need, across their entire stack, in a single command. 

The strongDM solution is comprised of three components: 

• Local client - that tunnels requests from the user’s Mac, Windows or Linux workstation to the gateway via a TLS 1.2-secured TCP connection
• Gateway intermediary - that can be deployed with a DNS entry, sit privately on the corporate network, and/or behind a VPN
• Configuration layer - users are assigned to roles, which are the collections of permissions across servers, databases, clusters and web apps. Configuration is pushed down to the end user’s local client and updated in real time.