Overview
The company needed a scalable way to govern privileged access across cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, and developer workflows while reducing standing privilege without slowing engineers.
Challenge
Broad, persistent entitlements had accumulated across GCP and SSH workflows.
Long-lived credentials and standing privileges increase the potential impact of a compromised account. They also make it difficult to govern consistently and often lack a complete record of what happened.
Even still, emergency access made it difficult to take that standing privilege away without fear of breaking downstream workflows for on-call engineers in the event that something went wrong. Developers needed to be able to respond quickly through PagerDuty, but the security team needed to understand who had access, why they had it and whether that exact scope and duration was actually needed.
Audit preparation added more work, requiring manual correlation across teams, systems and access activity in order to reconstruct evidence retroactively.
The company needed a model that would keep pace with developers:
- Minimize standing privilege risk across cloud, SaaS and break-glass workflows
- Preserve access agility during daily operations and incident response
- Work with Okta, PagerDuty, Slack, CLI and existing engineering tooling
- Simplify audit preparation with automated evidence logging tied to an accountable end user
- Seamlessly scale to support workload and agent access use cases
Solution
The company selected P0 to create a consistent policy enforcement and authorization layer across its existing environment.
P0 seamlessly plugged into existing tools and workflows, integrating with Okta to maintain authentication standards like SSO and MFA while layering in runtime access control. P0 evaluated whether access should be granted, what entitlement scope was needed and for how long.
The company could apply the same zero standing privilege model across GCP and SSH use cases, leveraging Okta, PagerDuty, Slack and P0’s CLI rather than managing disparate operations and policy frameworks. This allowed engineers to move quickly during an incident while maintaining security, accountability and a complete access history.
Results
During the evaluation, P0 demonstrated how the company could replace standing privilege with policy-driven, time-bound access across its production environment.
P0 Security was able to provide a central just-in-time access model across the customer’s production environments. Engineers requested access for a specific purpose, P0 evaluated it against policy, scoped it to the task and revoked it when the work was done.
PagerDuty workflows stayed intact but P0 added runtime policy enforcement, end-user accountability and a full activity record. Engineers maintained reliable, speedy access in the event of an outage or incident without the added risk of persistent privilege.
Audit preparation changed too. The team stopped pulling spreadsheets and chasing logs because every request, approval, grant and revocation ran through P0. Security could pass their GRC team a complete audit trail without asking engineering to reconstruct anything months later. Zero Standing Privilege in production, zero added user friction.