Apono Blog

Today’s digital landscape is full of ever-evolving cyber threats. Securing your organization’s identities has become very important. Azure Identity Protection is a strong ally. It empowers you to strengthen your defenses and protect your most valuable assets: your users’ identities. This strong security service gives you a single view of potential weaknesses. It also gives […]

The concept of least privilege access has emerged as a paramount principle, serving as a cornerstone for robust identity governance and access management strategies. By adhering to this tenet, organizations can effectively mitigate the risks associated with account compromises, insider threats, and unauthorized access to sensitive resources. However, achieving least privilege access across intricate, sprawling […]

Safeguarding your data is not just an option—it’s a necessity. Cyber threats are evolving at an unprecedented pace, and your database could be the next target. Whether you’re managing sensitive customer information or intricate analytics, database security should be at the top of your priority list. This article dives deep into the top 7 database […]

In today’s increasingly complex digital landscape, safeguarding sensitive data has never been more critical. Yet, many organizations grapple with balancing accessibility and security within their databases. Enter the concept of least privilege access, a pivotal strategy designed to minimize vulnerabilities by ensuring users have only the permissions essential for their role. However, scaling this principle […]

Protecting credentials has become increasingly critical in recent years, with everyday employees using more passwords, devices, and systems than ever before.  Remote work has significantly increased the risk of identity attacks. 55% of remote workers say they receive more phishing emails than they used to while working in the office and attempted password attacks are […]

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the world’s most widely used cloud services. At the heart of this system lies roles, which act as predefined sets of permissions that grant users specific access levels amidst the complexity of credentials, identities, and resources in the cloud environment. 74% of data breaches originate from the misuse […]

As the number of applications and participants grows within your cluster, it may be necessary to evaluate and limit the activities they can perform. For instance, you may consider restricting access to production to only a select few individuals. Alternatively, you may opt to provide a limited range of permissions to an operator deployed within […]

Organizations migrating or building applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) quickly realize the importance of securing IAM in the public cloud. For example, a misconfigured Google Cloud identity can inadvertently expose sensitive data or lead to a potentially crippling breach. Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suffered a massive data breach in 2020 […]

Maintaining a strong security posture is crucial in today’s digital landscape, and it begins with users. Trusting users with access to sensitive data and company assets is a web of complexity, and one bad apple or security gap can knock all the dominos down.  In fact, Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report noted that 74% […]

In 2023, data security faced an uphill battle against cyberattacks, and the risks of becoming a victim grew stronger.  There was a shocking 600% surge in cybercrime, with the average breach costing $4.37 million to recover from. The figures are up across the board, with cyberattacks occurring globally every 14 seconds.  Despite these unnerving statistics, […]

Failure to secure data is not an option. The risk of significant financial losses, operational downtime, reputational damage, and regulatory fines grows every year, and protecting your organization’s assets is more important than ever.  The average data breach cost rose to a staggering $4.45 million in 2023 and peaked at $11 million and $5.9 million […]

From financial records to employees’ personal details, almost all information nowadays is highly sensitive – and, therefore, highly valuable to attackers.  With 61% of data breaches involving credentials, it’s unsurprising that Identity and Access Management (IAM) is showcasing such rapid growth as a protection method against bad actors. Projected to hit a staggering $24 billion […]

In today’s digital landscape, where data reigns supreme, the ability to efficiently organize, store, and manage information is paramount. Enter directory services – powerful software systems designed to streamline the storage, organization, and retrieval of data within an operating system’s directory. Essentially, these services act as sophisticated digital maps, facilitating the lookup of named values […]

Keeping your cloud resources safe from prying eyes and bad actors is a continuous and relentless challenge, making it one of the most critical responsibilities for IT teams.  When it comes to the cloud, scalability is a key challenge. Managing roles and permissions for hundreds or even thousands of employees is daunting, but you can’t […]

Organizations often use multiple applications to perform business. For example, a tech team might find that Jira works well for managing tasks and a support team might find they prefer PagerDuty to handle support tickets. However, handling several applications and the data within them can be challenging. This is where webhooks step in as a middleware […]

As technology continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, the field of DevOps is no exception. DevOps, the cultural and professional movement that aims to improve collaboration between software development and IT operations, is predicted to transform, expand, and evolve significantly in 2024. In this blog post, we explore some key predictions for the DevOps […]

Intro to Roles in MySQL Diving into the world of roles in MySQL can seem daunting, especially when you’re trying to figure out permissions. Yet, when properly understood and managed, these roles and permissions can make your DevSecOps experience much smoother. Whether you’re a seasoned MySQL user or just starting, this guide will offer you […]

PostgreSQL is a powerful and feature-rich open-source relational database management system. One of its key features is the role-based access control (RBAC) system, which allows you to define and manage user access and permissions within your database. RBAC provides a flexible approach to access control, ensuring that only authorized individuals can perform specific actions. Roles […]

Do you want to establish a secure database environment in MongoDB? User permissions are paramount to ensure data protection, limit data access, and secure user operations. Our ultimate guide will show you how to create users and grant permissions in MongoDB, making your database management tasks easier and more efficient. Understanding MongoDB and User Management […]

Privileged Access Management (PAM) plays a crucial role in the security of any organization. Within PAM, the aspect of just-in-time self-service access has become increasingly important. By providing just-in-time access (that can be self-served) to essential resources, companies can significantly improve security measures while maintaining flexibility. In this post, we’ll delve into the role of […]

Most resources, such as databases or machines, are running in the cloud today and need privileged access. Yet few teams can effectively manage identities in the cloud at scale, with Gartner estimating that by 2023, 75 percent of cloud security failures will occur due to inadequate management of identities and accesses. As a result, controlling, […]

Achieving a zero-standing privileged environment is the most secure way to manage access to your databases.  This concept revolves around minimizing or altogether eliminating standing privileges, ensuring that users only acquire elevated access when absolutely necessary. This proactive security model is particularly crucial in safeguarding sensitive data housed within databases, as it mitigates the risk […]

Managing access rights for users has persistently posed a challenge for organizations, regardless of their size or industry. Access governance aims to enhance productivity while minimizing security risks. Additionally, maintaining a transparent overview of individuals with access to particular digital assets and ensuring the legitimacy of that access within compliance boundaries remains an obstacle.       Additionally, […]

The Harvard Business Review conducted a survey of more than 330 remote employees from a wide range of industries to self-report on both their daily stress levels and their adherence to cybersecurity policies over the duration of two weeks.  Employee Stress Leads to Failure of Cybersecurity Policies HBR found that across its sample, adherence to […]

We put together this guide containing the top 6 use cases we see all the time in addition to showing how a permissions management solution solves the issues.

A survey of 1,000 IT operations, DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE) and platform engineering professionals in the U.S. conducted by Transposit, a provider of an incident management platform, found more than two-thirds (67%) have seen an increase in the frequency of service incidents that have affected their customers over the past 12 months. Announced at […]

Automating the enforcement of least-privilege access brings numerous advantages to companies, encompassing heightened security, heightened operational efficiency, and improved compliance. By automating the process of granting and revoking access, organizations can drastically diminish the risk of unauthorized privileges, ensuring that employees possess only the resources essential for their specific roles. This minimizes the attack surface […]

Rho is an all-in-one finance platform that offers fully automated solutions for accounts payable, cards, expense management, and treasury. The Challenge: Flexible just-in-time access done right Rho operates in a market that is strongly regulated, and they were looking for a solution to help them meet access control requirements. They also needed a solution that […]

We’re excited to announce that we’ve just published our Buyer’s Guide for Privileged Access Governance solutions! Why we created the guide Most companies in the world today have already migrated most of their workloads to the cloud, with 91 percent of organizations reporting that they already have or will refactor their applications to use cloud-native […]

Organizations are twice as likely to get breached through compromised credentials than any other threat vector. Compromised credentials are when credentials, such as usernames and passwords, are exposed to unauthorized entities.  When lost, stolen or exposed, compromised credentials can give the intruder insider’s access. Although monitoring and analysis within the enterprise can identify suspicious activity, […]

For years, organizations have recognized the importance of closely managing employee access using identity governance and administration solutions. More recently, they have come to realize that the same level of governance is essential for non-employees as well.    A study sponsored by Opus and conducted by Ponemon found that 59 percent of companies reported data breaches […]

The modern workplace is constantly evolving, with organizations of all sizes needing to keep up with the ever-changing landscape. One essential part of ensuring a secure working environment is having the right permission control in place.  Fine-grained permission control is a powerful tool for organizations to manage access and security within their networks and systems. […]

Gartner recently released its annual Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management (PAM), offering insights into the leading solutions in the PAM space. While Gartner’s list is comprehensive and a good resource for those looking into PAM solutions, organizations will have varying preferences and requirements depending on their infrastructural nuances and security needs.  In this post, […]

IAM vs. PAM. The digital world has become a hub for organizational data and sensitive information. It is essential to manage this information …

Apono is excited to announce it’s been recognized in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management! In its short history (founded in 2021), Apono has already received a number of devoted users and is proud to receive this award. Summary The significance of robust privileged access management has never been higher, with cyberinsurance firms […]

In a perfect world, no one would have access to production, as that’s the safest way to make sure there won’t be any issues, however this remains unattainable for most companies.  On the one hand, providing developers access to production servers can be risky. If they make changes to the code or configuration, it could […]

In this webinar, we discuss the evolving nature of IT environments, the need for a security culture shift, the challenges and opportunities in modern IT security and the balance between security and user friendliness. 

For many organizations using AWS, the challenge of maintaining a least-privilege posture in their cloud operations is becoming increasingly difficult. This difficulty stems from the need to build access systems from scratch, remodel legacy tools, and prepare for future cloud service add-ons.  In addition, organizations are struggling with creating and managing AWS IAM users and […]

You know the frustration when you check your bank balance, and there’s another $40 charge for the gym membership you forgot to cancel. Or, more likely, you didn’t cancel it ‘just in case’ you wanted to work up a sweat sometime.  Always-on privileged access (otherwise called ‘standing privileges’) manifests similarly.  77% of organizations grant unrestricted […]

When you follow the principle of least privilege, you grant users just enough access so that they can carry out everyday activities, but can do nothing more. Following this principle helps you reduce risk. However, it can create friction for users when they occasionally need to perform a privileged action—such as dealing with an unexpected […]

A leader in the Human Resources and Recruitment Optimization space has expanded its operations to new AWS regions and requires a manageable, dynamic, and secure way to manage access and to adhere to customer requirements while maintaining operational needs. The Challenge The company would like to provide developers access to MongoDBs on its production environment. […]

Just-in-time database access is about managing access to specific databases. It has a lot of moving parts and may seem complicated, but there are things that can be done that make it much easier.  In this blog, we’ll explore roles and how access management to databases works today, why direct access to databases is needed, […]

Part 1: Permission management for databases Permission management for databases is a sore spot in many DevOps pipelines.  It requires a careful balancing act between access control and productivity. On one hand, privileged access exposes the organization to risks. On the other hand, if we restrict it too much, we end up with bottlenecks resulting […]

At Apono, we constantly hear from customers how difficult it is to set up granular permissions with F5, so we decided to dive in and see what’s so frustrating. We found a total of 6 issues. Check them out below. Quick Overview: What is F5? F5 is a company specializing in application security, multi-cloud management, […]

Introduction to Permissions in MySQL MySQL is a database application for Linux and part of the popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). A MySQL installation includes options of managing through a root user or specific user accounts. Managing user credentials in MySQL can be a time-consuming task, particularly when dealing with numerous MySQL instances […]

Find out how to enable Authentication in MongoDB Post Set-up. The tradeoff between productivity and permission security refers to the balance organizations must strike between enabling employees to be productive and efficient while ensuring that access to sensitive information and resources is adequately protected.

Our team had an amazing time at Kubecon Amsterdam, connecting with DevOps and developers from around the world and showcasing our permissions management automation platform—Apono.  We were thrilled to see the excitement and interest in our solution, as attendees recognized the need for better permission management in their organizations—from a security, time-saving and compliant perspective. […]

CloudSQL Access Controls Securing the development environment is a critical challenge for DevSecOps teams that must navigate multiple cloud environments and technologies. To improve collaboration between developers, security professionals, and IT operations staff, we need to provide secure access to physical networks and services—which often include providing elevated levels of permissions for databases such as […]

PostgreSQL Access Controls PostgreSQL is a widely popular relational structured database management system, PostgreSQL authorization is an ongoing process that checks each command, comparing it with the users account role and its associated privileges. Managing Permissions in PostgreSQL In the era of DevSecOps, ease of access and secure management of resources is essential to facilitating […]

Intro MySQL is a widely popular relational structured database management system, MySQL authorization is an ongoing process that checks each command, comparing it with the users account role and its associated privileges. MySQL Access Controls For many DevOps professionals, managing secure access to the company’s databases is a challenging task. You need to manage user […]

Intro MongoDB is a highly popular database commonly used for building Highly Available (HA) applications. Apono enables you to create Dynamic Access Flows that allow you to provision “Just–Enough” MongoDB access for “Just-in–Time” duration, assuring access is tailored to the task at hand, and revoking the access at the end of the access window, reducing […]

Does your access management hurt your team’s productivity? It does. How do we know? Let’s look at the data. Access and productivity in numbers The average employee has 191 passwords to keep track managing all those different usernames and passwords is a huge time suck. There’s no denying it: having to constantly remember a jumble […]

In this Q&A session with Moshe Belostotsky, Director of DevOps at Tomorrow.io, we dive into the changing role of DevOps and how security considerations are changing the way software is being built and delivered. Q: First of all, if you can tell me a little about yourself, what brought you into DevOps? A: “I was […]

Uber, the ride hailing giant, confirmed a major system breach that allowed a hacker access to Vsphere, google workplace, AWS, and much more, all with full admin rights.  In what that will be remembered as one of the most embarrassing hacks in recorded history, the hacker posted screenshots to the vx-underground twitter handle, from the […]

TLDR: Overprivileged access is a natural consequence of manually granting and revoking access to cloud assets and environments. What DevOps teams need are tools to automate the process. Apono automatically discovers cloud resources and their standing privileges, centralizing all cloud access in a single platform so you don’t have to deal with another access ticket […]

LastPass, a password manager with over 33M users reported an unauthorized party hacked into its development environment, the hackers were able to gain access through a single breached developer account.  Don’t act all surprised, getting hacked is a “WHEN” not an “IF” question  Everyone gets hacked eventually, the bigger a company is the bigger the […]

We recently went through the SOC2 process and are happy to report that we successfully passed our audit! Generating a SOC 2 Type 1 Report generally takes up to six months. In our case, the entire process took only 6 weeks, and we wanted to share how we did it. TLDR: We used Apono’s cloud-native […]

As born-in-the cloud organizations grow, natively managed Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools are becoming a growing concern. Although DevOps teams tend to bear the burden of cloud IAM provisioning, the operational challenges transcend functional silos. Even when SREs and infrastructure teams are closely aligned with security leaders, using native IAM tools to provision access […]

Earlier this week, IKEA Canada confirmed that an employee had accessed private customer information. Although the official announcement did not provide details, it’s a safe bet to assume that controls related to data governance and regulatory compliance are the primary guardrails that led to the revelation. Unfortunately, this particular case hardly represents an isolated incident.  […]