Applied Intuition Reduces Operational Overhead While Improving Security Posture and Dev Experience

About Applied Intuition

Applied Intuition provides advanced simulation software and infrastructure tools specifically designed for the development and testing of autonomous vehicles. Their technology assists in safely and efficiently accelerating the deployment of self-driving technology.

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“Our cloud infrastructure team uses P0 to automate access escalations for AWS resources, including customer environments and sensitive policies. It is a critical part of our security stack, and helps to control developer access to sensitive cloud resources, which is an important requirement for SOC2.

Prior to P0, our infrastructure teams manually processed access grants to engineers, using JIRA tickets. P0 has helped us automate all the toil around access provisioning and de-provisioning, and ensures that no developer has standing access to any privileged resource. This also helps increase our customers’ trust in us.”

Patrick Young, Director of IT and Security

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Challenge

To maintain compliance with SOC2 and other certifications, Applied Intuition implemented strict access controls on customer environments in AWS. Before engaging with P0, Applied faced several security and operational challenges with their IAM setup.

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Overhead with provisioning escalated access: Applied was processing access escalations via JIRA tickets, or ad-hoc messages over email or Slack. For a company experiencing rapid growth, the infrastructure team was getting inundated with at times 50+ requests a week. This was pure operational overhead for a team that had several high-priority projects in flight.

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Over-provisioned access: At times, an approver might forget to remove a developer’s access to privileged customer environments. Given Applied’s growth, this was becoming a security problem, as reinforcing customer trust was a high business priority for them.

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Poor developer experience: Approvals could sometimes take hours. This was especially challenging for on-call engineers. The last thing someone needs, when they are paged in the middle of the night, is to find out that they do not have the right level of access.

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Solution

The P0 team helped onboard Applied Intuition onto the platform during an hour-long Zoom call. Their cloud infrastructure team was then able to use P0 docs to configure P0 to suit their needs.

Key Features:

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• Access for privileged customer environments: Applied Intuition’s engineering teams use P0 for just-in-time and short-lived access to AWS permission sets and policies that provide them with access to customer environments.

• Access to sensitive AWS resources: Engineers can use P0 for just-in-time access to sensitive resources in AWS, such as pre-built managed policies (e.g., for full access to Lambda, or S3).

• Slack integration: Engineering team uses P0’s Slack integration for access requests and approvals.

• On-call automation via PagerDuty: Using P0’s integration with PagerDuty, on-call engineers can get automated access without requiring a human approval

Impact

Developer Experience: Mean-time-to-resolution of access requests has dropped from hours to minutes. For on-call engineers, resolution time is instantaneous, thanks to P0’s PagerDuty integration.

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Security: P0 has automated many of the infrastructure team’s repetitive tasks while enhancing the overall security posture.