Background:
A global technology company with over 2,000 employees across its development and professional services teams needed to access customer environments in its cloud platform. These environments are primarily hosted in AWS, with some instances in GCP and Azure. To manage cloud access, developers required secure SSH connections to virtual machines.
Challenges of Traditional PAM Solutions for Cloud Security
The company’s engineers primarily connect to cloud resources using SSH, which is considered privileged access for several reasons:
- It grants direct access to servers containing sensitive customer data and enables users to perform critical system configurations.
- SSH users may have administrative privileges or the ability to escalate access levels using sudo commands.
To effectively manage privileged access, the company required a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution due to the following factors:
- Security Risks: Native SSH clients on Windows or Linux require SSH keys on every endpoint, creating security risks if compromised.
- Operational Complexity: Regular SSH key rotation is cumbersome and operationally inefficient.
- Compliance Requirements: Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 require strict privileged access controls.
Why Legacy PAM Solutions Fell Short
Initially, the company used Okta’s ASA product to manage SSH-based privileged access. However, they encountered several challenges due to its proxy/bastion-based architecture, similar to tools like StrongDM and Teleport. These solutions introduce significant limitations:
- Limited Use Cases: Designed for early cloud environments, legacy PAM solutions focus on network-level access (e.g., SSH into VMs) but lack governance for modern cloud services like S3, IAM roles, and Kubernetes.
- High Operational Overhead: Requiring agents on every EC2 instance creates additional complexity for security and platform teams as cloud environments scale.
- Single Point of Failure: A third-party proxy and agents in the critical access path introduce potential downtime and security risks.
- Lack of Just-in-Time (JIT) Access: ASA lacked built-in support for just-in-time access and integrations with developer tools like Slack and PagerDuty, leading to poor user experience.
Why This Company Chose P0 for Next-Gen PAM
Recognizing these limitations, the company evaluated modern PAM alternatives, including P0 and StrongDM. Ultimately, they chose P0 because:
- Agentless Architecture: Unlike legacy PAM solutions, P0 eliminates the need for proxies and agents by leveraging cloud-native IAM APIs. For example, for SSH access, P0 uses AWS SSM, GCP IAP, and Azure Bastion services natively.
- Expanded Use Cases: With P0, the company can now manage:
- Fine-grained access to services like S3 and Kubernetes (EKS).
- Governance for non-human identities (e.g., AWS IAM roles, GCP service accounts).
- Cloud Identity Discovery: Full inventory of all identities with cloud access.
- Risk Mitigation: Identifying overprivileged roles, unused keys, and credentials.
- Governance Automation: Secrets rotation and risk remediation workflows.
- Just-in-Time (JIT) Access & Developer Experience: P0 natively integrates with Slack, JIRA, and PagerDuty, enabling workflows like JIT access requests and on-call automation without compromising security.
The Future of Privileged Access Management
By replacing its legacy PAM solution with P0’s next-gen PAM, this company has significantly enhanced security, streamlined operations, and improved developer experience. As cloud adoption continues to evolve, agentless, cloud-native PAM solutions like P0 are becoming essential for enterprises looking to secure privileged access at scale.
Want to enhance cloud security? Request a demo of P0 today.
