Overview
With 2,000+ developers and professional services engineers occasionally needing access to customer environments in Splunk Cloud, the team required a modern solution to manage privileged access without compromising security, productivity, or compliance.
As Splunk scaled, their legacy PAM solution, Okta ASA, introduced friction and overhead. Developers needed better ways to securely access EC2s and cloud services across AWS, GCP and Azure, without standing SSH keys or single points of failure.
Challenge
With customer environments hosted across AWS, GCP, and Azure, developers often needed SSH access to virtual machines—tasks considered highly privileged due to access to configurations, network controls, and sensitive customer data.
Splunk’s previous PAM, Okta ASA, introduced multiple pain points:
- Outdated architecture: ASA relied on a network proxy model that couldn’t govern cloud-native entitlements or fine-grained resource access.
- Operational overhead: Platform teams had to deploy agents on each EC2 instance, increasing complexity as infrastructure scaled.
- Developer friction: ASA lacked out-of-the-box support for just-in-time (JIT) access and didn’t integrate easily with modern tooling like Slack or PagerDuty.
- Single point of failure: The proxy-based architecture posed risks if the proxy or agents failed.
Splunk needed a modern PAM that could scale with their cloud-native workflows.
Solution
Splunk selected P0 after evaluating other options including Teleport, StrongDM, and CyberArk. P0’s agentless architecture, built to natively leverage cloud IAM APIs, stood out.
Using P0, Splunk now provides:
- Agentless JIT access to EC2s via AWS SSM, GCP IAP, and Azure Bastion—without network proxies.
- Expanded coverage across services like S3 and EKS, and for non-human identities such as IAM roles or service accounts.
- Cloud-native governance with workflows for secrets rotation and overprivileged role remediation.
- Slack, JIRA and PagerDuty integrations that enable seamless access requests and on-call automation.
Results
- Eliminated SSH keys and proxy dependencies
- Reduced operational complexity for platform teams
- Delivered instant, JIT access to production environments
- Laid foundation for future cloud access governance, including identity discovery and secrets management