Conjur brings automated authorization management to DevOps

When I began my career in IT as a network admin, a fair amount of my time was dedicated to just adding new users, removing users who had left the company, or changing permissions for users who switched roles or departments. I can’t even imagine trying to keep up with that chaos manually in a rapidly-changing DevOps environment.

That’s where a company like Conjur comes is. I wrote about how Conjur automates authorization management activities in this blog post:

One issue that has plagued IT since its inception is adding and removing authorized users. Most network and application security rely on somehow validating credentials to confirm that an individual is authorized to access the resources, but in a rapidly changing environment it is a serious challenge to keep authorization and authentication systems up to date. Conjur hopes to solve that problem.

What is Conjur? In a nutshell, Conjur is an API-backed virtual appliance that makes cloud infrastructure projects possible by giving DevOps teams the ability to manage permissions and authorizations in a secure, automated, and well-audited way. In other words, Conjur allows for automated authorization management.

Kevin O’Brien, part of the founding team at Conjur, shared some thoughts on Conjur, the issues the company seeks to address, and how Conjur can make life easier for DevOps teams. “As we’ve grown into the market, we’ve seen a lot of DevOps teams struggling with the same kind of authorizations problems, either slowing or killing cloud initiatives outright. For the ones that make it off the ground, they have to build a tangled web of handwritten scripts or hacked together key/certificate/user/access management inside of toolchains that are designed for other purposes (things like Puppet, Ansible, Docker, Chef, Salt, GitHub, etc.).”

Conjur provides a dedicated platform for conducting authorizations without relying on insecure alternatives. Rather than trying to force old authorization technologies and ideas—like Active Directory—into a radically new environment—like an agile DevOps infrastructure, organizations can leverage Conjur.

Read the full story at DevOps.com: Conjur up some agile, automated authorization management.

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Tony Bradley

Editor-in-Chief at TechSpective

I have a passion for technology and gadgets--with a focus on Microsoft and security--and a desire to help others understand how technology can affect or improve their lives. I also love spending time with my wife, 7 kids, 4 dogs, 7 cats, a pot-bellied pig, and sulcata tortoise, and I like to think I enjoy reading and golf even though I never find time for either. You can contact me directly at tony@xpective.net. For more from me, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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