Security breaches make headlines, while compliance audits keep teams on edge. The pressure to protect data and meet regulatory requirements is mounting—and often, the lines between security and compliance get blurred. Are they the same thing? Are they working in tandem—or pulling in different directions? This post breaks it down: what security and compliance are, how they intersect, where they differ, and most importantly, how your organization can align the two effectively.
StrongDM manages and audits access to infrastructure.
- Role-based, attribute-based, & just-in-time access to infrastructure
- Connect any person or service to any infrastructure, anywhere
- Logging like you've never seen
Following on the heels of our recent announcement of 2022 being the Year of Access, StrongDM continues to ease friction and remove the barriers standing between technical staff and access to the resources they need—without sacrificing security—with our latest product release.
We’ve made it even easier to manage access to backend infrastructure in an increasingly ephemeral computing environment. Simply put, this is the most impactful, far-reaching release we’ve done to date, and early feedback from our customers has been a resounding “yassssssss.”
Take a look.
Simplify Provisioning with Deeper Identity Provider Integrations
We listened to our customers and, by far, the feature everyone was clamoring for was deeper integrations with identity providers. In fact, according to our recent survey, 53% of organizations take hours or weeks to grant access to infrastructure. Additionally, 88% of organizations require two or more persons to approve access requests.
With the release of tighter integrations with Okta and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) (or any SCIM-based directory service for that matter), you now have the ability to manage just-in-time, least-privilege access to your critical infrastructure right from your preferred identity provider (IdP), dramatically reducing the time needed to approve requests and grant access.
This means increased developer productivity and faster development cycles, all while supporting Zero Trust security for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Not too shabby, eh?
More specifically, you can now:
- Automate user and group provisioning with a single source of truth.
- Synchronize Role assignments from your IdP to StrongDM.
- Choose which users and groups of users you want your IdP to manage in StrongDM.
- Manage policy exceptions via StrongDM by assigning IdP-managed users to StrongDM-managed Roles or StrongDM-managed users and service accounts to IdP-managed Roles.
Here’s a more in-depth product video that gives you a taste of what these integrations can do.
- Okta documentation
- Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) documentation
Get More Flexibility with Dynamic Access Rules
A perfect complement to static access rules, dynamic access rules eliminate loads of manual administrative work, giving businesses more granular control when provisioning infrastructure and enabling staff to access the resources they need more quickly.
Dynamic access rules enable businesses to enforce a powerful set of rules based on attributes such as tags and resource types. With this model, also known as attribute-based access control (ABAC), access is granted dynamically to Roles and their users every time a resource gets spun up or torn down.
This is particularly useful for companies with large installed bases with lots of resources on the backend, especially ephemeral ones. Basing access rules on tags offers much more flexibility with so much ephemerality in today’s computing landscape.
If you’re interested in seeing dynamic rules in action, check out this short video and let us know what you think. Good or bad.
- Dynamic Access Rules documentation
New to StrongDM? Sign up for our free no-BS demo and discover how frustration-free Zero Trust can work for you. Or, feel free to check out the results of our survey to see how you stack up against your peers.
About the Author
💙 this post?
Then get all that StrongDM goodness, right in your inbox.
You May Also Like
As teams grow and roles shift, it’s easy for permissions to get out of sync. That’s where user access reviews come in—they ensure every employee, vendor, or service account has exactly the access they need, and nothing more.Regular reviews reduce risk, prevent privilege creep, and help meet compliance requirements like SOX, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. But manual reviews? They’re slow, messy, and often incomplete.This guide breaks down the essentials of access reviews—what they are, why they matter, and how to make them painless with real-time visibility, automated workflows, and just-in-time access controls.
Secrets management is the practice of securely storing, accessing, and controlling digital authentication credentials such as passwords, API keys, certificates, and tokens used by applications and systems. It ensures that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access, while supporting automation, compliance, and security across modern infrastructure.
Legacy security models can’t protect modern financial systems. Continuous Authorization ensures real-time, risk-based access control for true Zero Trust. Learn how to secure your cloud and hybrid environments today.
This guide breaks down the top cloud database solutions reshaping how organizations store, manage, and scale data. From relational databases to NoSQL options, we’ll cover what matters most when choosing the right solution for your needs. By the end, you’ll understand how modern cloud databases drive scalability and performance—and which one is the best fit for your organization.