TeamSnap cut manual work to support administration by 80% even as the company doubled in size.

Rapid Growth Created New Access Problems

TeamSnap is a sports team and club management app that helps coaches, managers, and organizers streamline communication, scheduling, and payments for their teams and clubs.

Before StrongDM, TeamSnap managed infrastructure access through Google Cloud console using Google Cloud’s native tools. Company-wide headcount had doubled in just six months following an acquisition. The size of the platform engineering team more than quadrupled.

Rapid employee growth and the introduction of new roles introduced a substantial operational burden. Different directors owned access management for different systems. Historical policies limited the company’s IT support tool to automating employee access to a limited set of core applications. This resulted in manually managed access to all other systems.

Admins constantly ran through checklists to ensure they had correctly cleaned up access to resources. And developers lost time looking for answers to simple questions. Can you see this page? What do you have access to? There were growing challenges with sharing technical knowledge.

Be Safe, Please

The organization restructured following the acquisition, creating massive headaches for administrators. The directors had different hiring goals and perspectives, raising the need for a more mature approach to onboarding employees and the development of better guidelines about which tools were available to them.

They also needed to ensure that users had the requisite knowledge to be effective and safe in these systems. In a staging environment, at one point, a developer made a mistake running a migration and took down the system used by the dev team for QA assurance testing. While no applications in the live production environment were impacted, with limited logs and no easy and centralized way to view what was happening, it took them a while to figure out what was going on.

Scaling Is Simpler with StrongDM

TeamSnap acquired another company called LeagueSide, which operates in a different cloud. Because StrongDM supports every cloud and emerging technology, the two organizations could begin working together immediately without anyone having to change workflows.

Onboarding is now simple and effective. Trey says: “We have a single owner–that Senior Security engineer–who can automatically deploy and set up all the resources for a user’s team and role. There's no hunting everything down again.”

StrongDM’s Slack integration has streamlined user workflows and improved security. On-call engineers can easily request access with Access Workflows, and Admins know immediately when somebody is going into one of the production clusters.

If something were to go wrong, StrongDM enables TeamSnap to pinpoint exactly who did what, when with granular access logs and session replays. Now, the team can resolve incidents much faster and implement fixes to prevent them from happening again.

“StrongDM's maturity won us over really quickly. Developers love the simplicity of the tool and the extra resources like Helm charts for deployment, as well as Terraform support. It really is a fantastic product."

-Trey Tacon, Senior Director of Engineering at TeamSnap