StrongDM recently announced a massive Series B fundraising round, raising $54M which is to be used to create a new standard for infrastructure access management. This funding round shows that the need for better infrastructure access management is still growing in the modern world.
In this article, we will discuss the series B funding, its repercussions, and the need for better infrastructure access management.
Overview of the Problem
Infrastructure access management is an ever-growing problem that needs to be addressed. Access management is regulating or controlling access to physical and logical resources. Physical resources are typically components of an infrastructure, such as equipment, facilities, and data. Logical resources include authentication and authorization services, which allow for the provisioning or granting access to resources, and usability services, which refer to user access levels and preferences associated with them.
The problem is that various levels of infrastructure access (physical, logical) can lead to complexity when managing it. In addition, granting and denying access rights require a certain degree of control to ensure security policies are adequately implemented.
Moreover, the emergence of more sophisticated technologies (IoT devices) being introduced into existing systems presents new challenges related to infrastructure access management such as scalability issues and infrastructural support constraints. As such, organisations need to think carefully about their strategies for implementing infrastructure access solutions that address these problems while meeting their specific business requirements and complying with industry regulations and standards.
How StrongDM is Addressing the Problem
The current infrastructure access management system is ill-equipped to handle the demands of businesses and organisations whose infrastructure is increasingly made up of multiple networks, including hybrid cloud solutions. Traditional tools cannot manage these complex environments, resulting in inadequate auditing and logging, insufficient authorization controls, and an employer’s inability to provide granular access management. This can result in poor user experience, elevated security risks, and limited compliance with industry standards.
StrongDM offers a comprehensive solution to this problem. Its platform includes a unique combination of a powerful access governance software and secure vault technology – providing organisations with quick and easy remote workforce enablement while ensuring proper segregation of duties. With its centralised administrative console, businesses can issue certificates that allow users on multiple connected networks to securely access privileges for authorised operations without the need for manual authentication each time. Additionally, its detailed audit trails help organisations track user activity by logging session information including connection timeframes and accessed resources – eliminating gaps in visibility into user activities. Finally, StrongDM’s comprehensive auditing capability enables automated validation for compliance with policies built into the system and industry standards like ISO27001 and SOC2 Type 2 requirements without manually entering data or running reports each week.
StrongDM Announces $54M Series B To Create A New Standard For Infrastructure Access Management
StrongDM is a company that provides solutions for secure access to infrastructure and applications. With their new $54M Series B, StrongDM is set to create a new standard for infrastructure access management.
These solutions have many benefits, such as improved security, onboarding, and access management. In this article, we’ll discuss the full range of benefits that StrongDM can provide.
Increased Security
Security is a major organisational priority when setting up an access management structure. StrongDM is the leading access management solution, providing various measures to ensure secure information access.
With two-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) features, StrongDM allows only authorised users to access sensitive infrastructure and manage user passwords in a secure environment.
Additionally, StrongDM’s Zero Trust Model ensures that access policies are enforced at all times, guaranteeing that resources remain secure despite changes in roles or personnel within an organisation.
Furthermore, organisations can set up audit trails with network monitoring and third-party compliance systems to track activities on their systems in real time.
Overall, establishing an infrastructure security protocol with StrongDM minimises the risk of potential data breaches by strictly regulating who has permission to view and edit data stored in a system.
Improved Accessibility
StrongDM is the best way to keep up with the ever-changing infrastructure access and management issues. With StrongDM, organisations can centrally manage, monitor, and track access controls across multiple servers and databases. As a result, identify users accessing unauthorised systems and data, prevent overly privileged access, reduce effort managing user access without impacting productivity, save time with easily understandable reporting features.
StrongDM also offers improved accessibility to important resources and increased flexibility through shared user roles across a team or organisation. Data security is improved by allowing admins complete control over users’ access rights and configurable user identity lifecycles for automated regulation compliance. This makes onboarding users for IT teams easier than ever before. StrongDM can also monitor connections in real-time so that appropriate administrators are notified immediately when violations occur. With enhanced visibility into who is accessing what resource from where, StrongDM can help secure an organisation’s infrastructure like never before.
Enhanced Auditing and Compliance
StrongDM simplifies and enhances auditing and compliance efforts with greater security and centralised visibility into infrastructure access. Organisations can now gain a real-time look into who is accessing what, when, from where, and why. In addition, with machine identity assurance, administrators can understand the source of an access request and detect any anomalies in user behaviour. This heightened level of governance provides organisations with a more secure environment for their infrastructure—with reduced risk for potential compliance issues.
Sensitive data is further protected through granular permissioning that manages non-privileged access to resources containing sensitive data. Additionally, Security Information Event Management (SIEM) systems benefit from StrongDM auditing capabilities such as High-Availability (HA) logging with rotating log storage enabling logging in multiple low overhead clients while providing deeper visibility into what is happening inside an organisation’s security architecture. Automatic log rotation helps keep data organised while also uniquely identifying information so compliance teams can quickly obtain the needed records without having to search through messy or irrelevant files.
StrongDM provides the latest features in least privileged access control and auditing that ensure organisations meet strict regulatory standards around privacy, security and compliance while maintaining business objectives and productivity goals. In addition, with its comprehensive audit-driven insights solution, StrongDM enables IT teams to interface requestors with their resources quickly while allowing them to focus on high-level improvements within their organisation’s infrastructural environment.
How StrongDM Works
StrongDM is a secure, audited, cloud-based infrastructure access management solution that enables safe, frictionless access between applications, databases, Kubernetes clusters, and other IT resources. It provides a single platform that is easy to manage and helps organisations improve their security posture, streamline operations, and achieve compliance.
In this article, we’ll explore how StrongDM works and how it can benefit organisations by providing a comprehensive access management system.
Centralised Access Management Platform
StrongDM is a centralised access management platform that allows enterprises to delegate, control, audit, and monitor privileged access to all their IT infrastructure from one easy-to-manage console. By eliminating the need for multiple point solutions, manual process configurations, and long turnaround times for IT operations, StrongDM ensures trust over who can access sensitive data in your environment.
The platform allows users to securely authenticate and authorise into their systems using short-lived certificates instead of traditional passwords. This certificate-based authentication process helps ensure only trusted users are given access to resources in the system and any activities are securely audited. StrongDM’s centralised platform also provides IT teams full visibility over who has accessed what resources within their environment at any given time. In addition, utilising role-based access control (RBAC) policies gives admins granular control over who can make changes and increase their security further by automatically revoking permissions whenever necessary.
StrongDM also provides integrations with Okta and other SSO providers making it easier than ever for users to authenticate into the system immediately after onboarding or changing jobs within an organisation. Furthermore, its extensive logging capabilities provides admins greater transparency, enabling them to easily detect suspicious activities through consistent auditing and helping them pass relevant compliance requirements such as SOC2 Type 2 or PCI DSS among others.
Single Sign-On Authentication
StrongDM allows users to authenticate to the remote infrastructure using single sign-on (SSO) authentication. SSO works by storing a single account in one directory server (such as Active Directory or LDAP) and leveraging that account for multiple applications. So, instead of remembering countless usernames and passwords, users can authenticate with their existing credentials and credentials will be validated against the directory server before granting access.
Additionally, SSO provides an extra layer of security, since only those approved in the user directory can access the remote infrastructure. SSO is a key component of Privileged Access Management Systems (PAM), allowing organisations to securely manage privileged user accounts.
Role-Based Access Control
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a core feature of StrongDM and a modern approach to infrastructure access management. RBAC allows organisations to efficiently manage user access without sacrificing security or regulatory compliance. This user access model focuses on roles rather than passwords to ensure granular control and monitoring over which users, teams, and applications can access an organisation’s systems.
RBAC divides user privilege into two levels — roles and committees. Roles are assigned easily – without the tedious effort needed for manual password assignments – while committees dictate which parts of the system users can access by your organisation’s security policies. In addition, it is easy to add new roles and committees should the need arise, making RBAC flexible enough for administrators of all experience levels to quickly configure it for their needs.
StrongDM also offers role-based audit logging for extra oversight over who or what made changes or accessed privileged information. This allows you to keep an up-to-date audit trail that paints a complete picture of how users interact with authorised databases, servers, applications and networks through their assigned credentials. Plus, auditor/reviewer privileges in StrongDM enable an additional layer of oversight so that unauthorised personnel cannot modify even with full admin rights in StrongDM UI or API calls made directly from command line utilities such as curl or wget.
What the Future Holds
Following the StrongDM Series B announcement, there is a growing need to rethink how companies access and control their data. Increasingly, organisations need an infrastructure access management solution that is compatible, secure, and monitoring their network performance.
As the market continues to evolve, let’s explore the future of infrastructure access management.
New Infrastructure Access Management Standards
Technological advances have enabled explosive population growth, and the need for better access management standards across all areas of infrastructure has become critical. As a result, many countries are migrating to new access systems that allow for higher levels of security, improved speed and accuracy.
The future will most likely be characterised by developing sophisticated access control methods with higher degrees of personalization. For example, access control systems may include virtual authentication credentials, biometric authentication methods and automated authorization systems. These solutions can work together to provide accurate user-specific access to infrastructure components such as elevators, power plants and other key facilities.
In addition to integrating new identification and access control technologies, governments will be tasked with creating standards across multiple industries to ensure consistent security throughout the entire country’s infrastructure networks. This initiative may require financial investment for public and private sectors to ensure everyone’s safety.
It is expected that governments worldwide will work towards developing effective access management solutions through continued investment into research, development and implementation of initiatives geared towards improving the overall security provided by their infrastructure networks. However, a comprehensive understanding of the importance of protecting public goods from unauthorised access is necessary for true improvement in this space, not just a casual interest in what sort of technology should be used for such tasks.
Improved Security and Accessibility
As more and more of our activities are based online, there is a growing need for secure access to critical infrastructure systems. In addition, improved security and accessibility for users and administrators is needed to ensure these systems remain resilient against malicious threats. By creating ways to authenticate user identities, blocking unwanted network traffic or malware attempts, or limiting the access authority of administrators, we can ensure that infrastructure networks remain safe and secure.
Furthermore, improved connectivity technology could make it possible to safely access crucial infrastructure systems with a reliable internet connection from any location. This could make it easier for users to work remotely if needed and enable the development of advanced programs that can monitor an infrastructure’s performance in real-time and recommend adjustments when necessary.
The aim should be to create an increasingly secure infrastructure environment while improving accessibility (especially in remote areas). To do this, we must continue investing in proactive data security measures and developing enhanced remote access technologies—all of which could go a long way towards making our essential services more reliable and secure for everyone involved.
Increased Efficiency and Compliance
As a result of the growing demand for infrastructure access management, many businesses have been striving to increase efficiency and compliance in their IT network. By implementing scalable and automated processes, companies can better monitor and maintain the secureness of their networks. This includes using advanced encryption, authentication tools, secure identity management services and multifactor authentication processes to ensure the highest levels of security are maintained. Additionally, increased automation can streamline access approval processes by establishing standards around what type of users and applications should be allowed on a particular device or network.
Additionally, organisations recognize that increased efficiency comes from increased compliance with industry regulations such as HIPAA-HITECH and GDPR-NISD. To meet these requirements efficiently, businesses need to leverage automation capabilities to better align their internal security protocols with industry regulations while also providing an easy way for users to request access from the system via a single sign-on portal or similar mechanism that forces compliant behaviour from both the user’s side as well as from the IT department’s side. Furthermore, companies must ensure that data is segmented appropriately so that data stored in different locations complies with local laws regarding asset ownership and disposal, preventing potential conflicts between global privacy regulations.
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