Beekeeper Eliminates VPN Pain with Zero Trust Security

Companies around the world use Beekeeper to connect their frontline teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Beekeeper’s frontline success system helps companies ditch paper and manual processes to improve employee engagement, retention, and performance. 

High-growth companies like Beekeeper face a common but fundamental challenge: scaling access management while maintaining security and efficiency. Beekeeper grappled with a complex environment that relied on numerous VPNs–one for every region in AWS and GCP. That meant that engineers had to juggle multiple VPNs, leading to a slow, frustrating experience. Furthermore, every engineer needed credentials to access different endpoints within the network.

The complexity combined with the slow, cumbersome processes inevitably become unmanageable, and Beekeeper knew there was a better world out there.

Why StrongDM Won

Beekeeper did its homework when it came time to enlist an access management partner. The company selected StrongDM after engaging with Teleport and HashiCorp Boundary. According to Head of DevOps Daniel Solsona, StrongDM was the clear winner on the technical front. 

"StrongDM was much simpler architecturally than Teleport. With Teleport, you need to run all these different services, and it got to be too much. It was much simpler to run StrongDM compared to Teleport. Hashicorp Boundary was 4-5 years away from what StrongDM is doing now"

- Daniel Solsona, Head of DevOps, Beekeeper

Ease-of-Use Leads to Widespread Adoption

Ensuring the right people have the correct privileges if and when they need them is vitally important for the frontline businesses Beekeeper serves, making it critical that any access solution be widely adopted across teams. By being easy to deploy and easy to use, Beekeeper has seen StrongDM deployed and adopted by every team it’s been rolled out to. Daniel recalls, "The previous approach was nuts and painful, but [StrongDM] is glorious. It's funny; we got lots of people saying, 'This is the best thing that has happened in a long time.' People are loving [StrongDM] because it removes a lot of friction that we had in there before. 

The ability to onboard and offboard employees has also been greatly simplified. In Daniel's words, the ability to onboard and, more importantly, confidently offboard people by removing a user from the single sign-on (SSO) provider is golden. Now [with StrongDM], we know we just remove the user, and they're gone. We don't have to worry about anything." 
 

Leveraging Access Workflows to Meet the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)

When it comes to access requests, Beekeeper uses StrongDM’s Access Workflows capability to automate workflows and route human approvals. The ability to make a universal change in the infrastructure (like adding a database in AWS) and have that access extend to whoever needs it in an automated way has been game-changing. There's no need to provision every user or let everyone know a new piece of infrastructure exists. 

Now, when an admin makes a change in StrongDM, that change is immediately reflected for all the users in StrongDM. Beekeeper can now easily enable the Principles of Least Privilege (PoLP), granting specific people access only when needed to particular systems in AWS or GCP. 

For example, by default, no one in production can access any system containing customer data. Users can, however, request that data through an access workflow and receive read-only access. Admins control when these requests are automated and when they require human approval. By eliminating end-user credentials and leaning into Least Privilege, Beekeeper is on track to achieve its ultimate goal: Zero Trust.

Zero Trust Within Reach

This type of dynamic access is the foundation for Beekeeper’s Zero Trust initiatives. "We chose StrongDM for the flexibility and simplicity. Suddenly, achieving Zero Trust is not that daunting because the tools are there. Obviously, you still need to put effort into designing the proper access levels. But you don't need to build anything by yourself. Everything is provided to you."

Searching for Zero Trust? Discover how StrongDM can transform your organization's access management, ensuring security, efficiency, and scalability. Book a demo.