StrongDM: The Dynamic Access Management Platform
StrongDM, IncExternal reviews
100 reviews
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Perfect solution for secure access to cloud resources
What do you like best about the product?
What do I like best can easily be summed up by sayng "it just works". Since we initially on boarded with StrongDM the solution has worked for us. As with anything there have been minor hiccups but their support team is quick to email or hop on a zoom and resolve these hiccups. It's been easy enough for all of our teams, even the less techinical ones, to use without the need for significant training.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is not much now that I dislike besides the color scheme. In the past, they would release new features and not let us know about them or how they could be used to solve new issues. This has gotten better as we now have more and more contact with our CSM.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We found StrongDM when we were starting down our compliance path, starting with SOC 2 Type II compliance. StrongDM helped us protect our cloud resources with private networks but still allows employees to connect to these resources when necessary. Plus it adds all the necessary audit trails.
Audited access control for all
What do you like best about the product?
Nearly instant-on access control for all major infrastructure resources. Everything is auditable - you know who had access and when and what they did. Can be set up with no inbound firewall holes if needed. Continually improved.
What do you dislike about the product?
Website access control can only be used with some kinds of authentication.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Access control; Compliance; Auditability of access; Removal of dependency on VPN
Wonderful product, wonderful team. Makes my work easier and our company's security posture stronger.
What do you like best about the product?
Having StrongDM makes access control and audits a breeze. I get instant visibility into who is accessing my system and what they are doing. I can quickly grant and revoke access to different sources and it is all controlled in one interface.
What do you dislike about the product?
We host StrongDM ourselves and we hold onto logs ourselves as well. It's a little cumbersome to parse through those logs afterward. Certain logs like DB queries are better and we wrote a script to understand what is happening but the server actions recording logs are cryptic.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Access control and audit trails are the largest benefits I see. At first, it was used for our compliance + IT team to have dynamic fine-grained access control but now we are also expanding it to use for other departments to access data too.
Minimal Overhead, Maximum Value
What do you like best about the product?
StrongDM has minimal overhead to run. Setting up in k8s is a breeze, and has a boilerplate template in the documentation with minimal configuration needed.
We honestly didn't need to compare to the competion because how quick it was to install and configure.
We honestly didn't need to compare to the competion because how quick it was to install and configure.
What do you dislike about the product?
Not much. There are a lot of items you can configure in their UI, which can be confusing at first. StrongDM has excellent documentation and has been making some improvements here.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As an administrator and daily user, I can easily say it has made my daily work much more manageable. We have fantastic feedback from our dev team as well.
Time spent connecting to private resources and using traditional methods of authentication has dropped, and more time is spent on the actual work :)
Time spent connecting to private resources and using traditional methods of authentication has dropped, and more time is spent on the actual work :)
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Give it a try. It's pretty easy to see the value just by setting it up.
SDM provides a seamless experience
What do you like best about the product?
StrongDM makes it incredibly easy for me to work in various K8 clusters in various environments.
What do you dislike about the product?
So far, the product delivers the marketed solution as expected
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our engineering organization no longer needs to access bastions with a script. Additionally we have more control over access to the bastions
strongDM to the rescue
What do you like best about the product?
What do you like best?
Where to begin... ease of onboarding/offboarding users. Audit of any shenanigans that those users try to execute. The set-and-forget process of temporary elevation of permissions/resources. Quick support when encountering any issues (hear this, some wait-three-days-for-reply companies that shall remain unnamed). And much more!
Where to begin... ease of onboarding/offboarding users. Audit of any shenanigans that those users try to execute. The set-and-forget process of temporary elevation of permissions/resources. Quick support when encountering any issues (hear this, some wait-three-days-for-reply companies that shall remain unnamed). And much more!
What do you dislike about the product?
With "tighter integrations with Okta and Azure AD," the company is still working out all the kinks to integrate with Google suite groups. I understand that that is not an easy task, and the integrations will soon come out.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
What brought us to StrongDM is a need for detailed audit and access control to all Databases, internal website endpoints, Kubernetes, and AWS resources.
StrongDM provides us with all these capabilities and more.
StrongDM provides us with all these capabilities and more.
Team members who are friendly, dedicated, and professional.
What do you like best about the product?
StrongDM team is very responsive to our needs. They respond almost immediately if we have a problem or a question. In addition to monthly meetings, we have cases follow-up meetings as well.
It's a friendly and pleasant team.
It's a friendly and pleasant team.
What do you dislike about the product?
Since StrongDM is a growing company, it's difficult to meet all the needs of every customer. There are times when we have a special request, but in those cases, the team immediately opens a feature request and updates us on the progress.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Using StrongDM solutions, we can gain centralized access to our resources and audit the actions of end-users.
Simple and powerful; one of those tools that both Admins and Clients both like to use
What do you like best about the product?
From the Admin side, it's intuitive and expansive. It's so nice to have a single pane of glass to manage different access to resources; but a killer feature is granting temporary access. As teams change, people go on-call, or various other changes happen, roles can be dynamically changed and updated- all autonomously after rules are established. This minimizes overhead, greases the wheels and gets developers, auditors, directors; whoever the right access they need every time without having to step in.
In addition, I appreciate that SDM has expanded so much since we began using them a few years back. It seems like they are always looking for new services to implement and work with; making SDM an absolute integral part of our infrastructure. I appreciate their human-centric design as well; no complex (specific) jargon; clear labels, and excellent documentation and Github repo for nontraditional deployments.
Finally; I appreciate the elegance of this solution. It's a simple solution to a complex problem. The Gateways/Relays are straightforward in how they do what they do. Understanding the internals of something is big; it's not necessarily a black box-- so troubleshooting and extension becomes easy and intuitive. From a client perspective, it's incredibly easy to understand and jump between different resources with minimal training. Always fantastic when a userbase is easy to pick up a new tool and use it without question. Minimizes our overhead, increases security, and simply works. This is the rare exception where increasing security at the end-user level actually improves the user experience.
In addition, I appreciate that SDM has expanded so much since we began using them a few years back. It seems like they are always looking for new services to implement and work with; making SDM an absolute integral part of our infrastructure. I appreciate their human-centric design as well; no complex (specific) jargon; clear labels, and excellent documentation and Github repo for nontraditional deployments.
Finally; I appreciate the elegance of this solution. It's a simple solution to a complex problem. The Gateways/Relays are straightforward in how they do what they do. Understanding the internals of something is big; it's not necessarily a black box-- so troubleshooting and extension becomes easy and intuitive. From a client perspective, it's incredibly easy to understand and jump between different resources with minimal training. Always fantastic when a userbase is easy to pick up a new tool and use it without question. Minimizes our overhead, increases security, and simply works. This is the rare exception where increasing security at the end-user level actually improves the user experience.
What do you dislike about the product?
Audit log retrieval / search could be a little bit more intuitive. A solution was outlined to us (created by SDM) to output over to our log aggregator, which helps immensely-- but it could be more straightforward.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We're using SSO tools that mainly give FE access; but configuring these tools individually for backend access is much more of a challenge (and on some services, tiered).
Using this product allows us to speed up Onboarding, Access Management, and reduces management overhead drastically. Being able to link from an SSO provider all the way down to an IAM role for a specific resource (or dynamic resources based off of tags), while having a FULL audit trail is incredible.
Another key feature that we appreciate about SDM is that we can automatically escalate privileges based on on-call schedules. This ensures that we can follow an 'access level of least privilege, not to mention does away with hanging permissions that may have been manually adjusted. We are able to give more granular access to more people by using StrongDM; speeding up development, debugging, and incident response.
Using this product allows us to speed up Onboarding, Access Management, and reduces management overhead drastically. Being able to link from an SSO provider all the way down to an IAM role for a specific resource (or dynamic resources based off of tags), while having a FULL audit trail is incredible.
Another key feature that we appreciate about SDM is that we can automatically escalate privileges based on on-call schedules. This ensures that we can follow an 'access level of least privilege, not to mention does away with hanging permissions that may have been manually adjusted. We are able to give more granular access to more people by using StrongDM; speeding up development, debugging, and incident response.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
The cost to benefit ratio here is off the chart. It's easy to set up, the support team has been very responsive, and frankly, it's easy to troubleshoot outside of support. The application is easy to admin, and it's one of the few tools that our end-users actually like to use and ask to integrate further.
StrongDM has made extremely high toil tasks like database and kubernetes access management a breeze
What do you like best about the product?
By far the most helpful for us is the database and access management features, this is StrongDM's bread and butter. We currently use StrongDM for database access management, kubernetes access management, and SSH monitoring. We are currently exploring the other features offered like Secret Stores.
What do you dislike about the product?
The only thing that I really disliked at first was the user management, but StrongDM listened to their users and made huge updates over the past year in this area and it's now a breeze. Another feature would be a way to search through activity logging via the admin ui, this is easily done via the cli and by piping your logs to stdout but an in admin ui log search would be very useful.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The main problem is the nightmare that managing database authentication is across a team of engineers. Prior to StrongDM we were managing users directly in postgres/mysql and this can be a full time job depending on how many databases you manage. StrongDM has now made this headache of a task into a breeze.
strongDM is a must have partner if innovation is your thing!
What do you like best about the product?
It has helped us avoid the need to manage database usernames and passwords for routine access; Helped answer questions like Who, When, What, and Where on a Splunk Dashboard; Automating onboarding/off-boarding, and a simplified manager approval process thanks to slack integrations.
What do you dislike about the product?
I am honestly struggling to find anything to improve on.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Getting access to data was not trivial. It was time consuming for both DBAs and Engineers.
Thanks to strongDM we were able to achieve better operational efficiency.
Thanks to strongDM we were able to achieve better operational efficiency.
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