Provisioning Just-In-Time Access via ChatOps

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 the 2023 Kubecon + CloudNative conference in Chicago, the survey found 62% of respondents have also seen an increase in the amount of time it takes to resolve incidents over the course of the last year, with 80% reporting it takes up to six hours on average to resolve incidents from the first alert to mitigating the issue.

Before we dive into the ways that automated provisioning helps teams resolve more issues at a faster rate, let’s take a look at some of the terms we’ll be using in this article.

What is ChatOps?

ChatOps is like a team collaboration tool on steroids. It’s a concept that brings together communication and collaboration within a team’s workflow by integrating them into a chat platform or a messaging tool. Instead of switching between different tools and interfaces, team members can execute commands, monitor systems, and collaborate on tasks directly within the chat platform.

What is Incident Management and Response?

Security incident management is the process of identifying, managing, recording and analyzing security threats or incidents in real-time. It seeks to give a robust and comprehensive view of any security issues within an IT infrastructure.

Incident response (IR) is the process by which an organization handles a data breach or cyberattack. It is an effort to quickly identify an attack, minimize its effects, contain damage, and remediate the cause to reduce the risk of future incidents.

ChatOps and Incident Management

The connection between effective communication and successful incident management is no mystery. Teams that excel in communication and collaboration not only address incidents more swiftly but also maintain satisfaction among both internal teams and external users.

Moreover, their adeptness in postmortems aids in pinpointing underlying issues and proactively preventing future incidents. It’s no wonder that ChatOps has seamlessly integrated into the processes of numerous incident management teams.

What is Just-in-time Access?

Just-in-time permission management, also known as JIT or Just-in-time access, is a cybersecurity approach rooted in the principle of least privilege. It grants users access to assets only when necessary and within a limited timeframe. Once the allotted time expires, users automatically lose access to resources, including applications and systems.

By employing JIT methodology to restrict the timeframe of user access rights, the likelihood of attackers infiltrating your cloud security perimeter is significantly reduced. This becomes crucial as cloud-based breaches accounted for 45% of incidents in 2022, highlighting the growing presence of applications, services, users, and resources in the cloud. Just-in-time permission management (JIT) emerges as an essential strategy in this context.

While traditional Privileged Access Management (PAM) processes, such as session management, prove effective for on-premises environments, JIT shines in regulating access across cloud resources.

How Does Provisioning Just-in-Time Access Work?

JIT provisioning automates the process of generating and updating user accounts. IT administrators are relieved from the manual task of individually creating accounts across various applications, all thanks to JIT provisioning. Instead of proactive account creation, user accounts come into existence when users initiate their first login attempts to applications, provided they have the necessary authorization.

The concept of provisioning Just-in-Time access comes into play specifically when users log in to an application through a third-party identity provider. By doing so, JIT provisioning removes the necessity of manual user provisioning or account creation, resulting in significant savings of both effort and time.

How Does ChatOps Relate to Provisioning Just-in-Time Access?

ChatOps bridges the gap between human interaction and automated processes, resulting in a powerful tool that empowers modern teams. It’s a game-changer in DevOps and beyond, boosting efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. When used for just-in-time access to sensitive resources, it becomes even more of a necessity for busy dev teams.

Think of it as a way to streamline and automate operational tasks by leveraging the power of chat and collaboration tools. It enhances transparency, efficiency, and collaboration among team members, making it easier to manage and respond to incidents, deploy updates, and perform various operations—all from within a chat interface. It’s like having a virtual team command center right in your chat room!