INDUSTRY
HEADQUARTERS
SIZE
A large UK-headquartered insurance company needed to modernise how business users, particularly actuaries, accessed sensitive cloud-hosted databases. The initiative was business-critical and required delivery within a tight timeframe.
The Challenge
At the heart of the insurer’s operations are its actuaries and the supporting teams responsible for risk modelling and decision-making. These teams rely on timely, direct access to core datasets to ensure insurance models are accurate and actuarial decisions remain valid.
However, this data is highly sensitive and the environment in which it lives is complex. The organisation needed to support more than 2,000+ largely non-technical business users, many of whom lacked familiarity with database connection methods, while still enabling seamless access to critical data. At the same time, permissions were spread across a multi-domain environment and multiple Azure subscriptions, making access management difficult to standardise and audit.
This created a fundamental challenge:
How can we give business users the access they need without compromising security, compliance, or operational efficiency?
The requirements fell into three key areas:
1. Security & Compliance
- Ensure secure access to cloud databases
- Strengthen compliance with internal policies and industry standards by capturing full, protocol-level logs of all actuarial queries
- Avoid introducing unmanaged or high-risk access paths
2. User Experience
- Preserve existing colleague workflows
- Maintain speed, performance and reliability
- Avoid clunky or complex access methods that would slow teams down
3. Cost & Operational Efficiency
- Avoid jump servers and the cost of managing and maintaining them
- Minimise training requirements
- Prevent disruption to existing business processes
- Deliver a solution that was operationally lightweight and cost-effective
Evaluated Approaches:
The team considered traditional approaches which included jump server–based access models. However, these options introduced significant drawbacks, such as a poor user experience, increased operational overhead and higher infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Ultimately, StrongDM stood out as the only solution that allowed users to continue working natively with their existing endpoints, workflows, and tools, without introducing additional friction or complexity.
Why StrongDM?
StrongDM enabled colleagues to access cloud databases directly from their endpoints using their existing applications.
- No jump servers
- No new tools to learn
- Minimal performance impact
- Access that felt “almost invisible” to users
This ensured that actuarial and business teams could continue working efficiently, without disruption to established workflows.
StrongDM met the insurer’s strict security and compliance requirements through:
- Gateway-based architecture aligned with internal security standards
- Centralised access control
- The ability to enforce additional safeguards such as Just-in-Time (JIT) access
This allowed the organisation to maintain strong governance while still enabling broad, controlled access to sensitive data.
Results: Decreased complexity, increased savings
The results spoke for themselves. The team received secure, compliant access to cloud databases in a timely and user-friendly manner. This enabled the actuarial and business users to maintain productivity and performance, while directly reducing operational complexity as well as decreasing infrastructure costs for the business.
The biggest win? Due to the success of the initial deployment, the organisation’s CTO leadership is now asking: “What else can we do with StrongDM?”
StrongDM has become a strategic platform for secure access, not just a point solution.