Apono: Tool to Automate Just-in-Time, Temporary Access

Cybersecurity is at the forefront of every IT team’s mind. However, given the complexities of today’s modern infrastructure, organizations have delegated the responsibility of securing production applications, flows and workspaces to their end users, specifically the DevOps teams.

This added responsibility has diverted DevOps teams from their primary role of delivering value to their customers and organizations. It also hampers productivity due to the restrictive and intricate access control requirements.

We’d like to introduce a free tool that simplifies access and permissions management across the DevOps domain, fully integrating into cloud assets, network and developer applications, databases and more.

What Is Apono?

Apono is a cloud native centralized access management platform. With Apono:

1. Create Access Flows to allow specify approvers, duration, context (groups in your internal developer portal (IDP) , on-call shifts, tickets in your IT service management tool, daytimes per time zone and more) and more.
2. Employees can request or automatically receive (per context) access to any R&D application or data repository (with a granular-level permissions) all through Slack, Teams or via command line interface (CLI).
3. Permissions are granted, revoked and fully audited automatically according to Access Flow.
4. Every access is audited.

Getting Started in Three Steps

1. Install a Connector

Connectors are the components that mediate between Apono and your resources to sync data from cloud applications and grant and revoke access permissions.The connector does not read, cache or store any secrets, nor does Apono need an account with admin privileges to function. The connector contacts your secret store or key vault when it needs to sync data or provision access.

Here’s how connectors work:

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2. Integrate with Cloud Apps

After you’ve installed the connector, integrate Apono with your cloud applications to sync data on users, groups, resources and permissions. Apono has integrations for more than 35 resource types in Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Google Cloud Platform, Azure and Kubernetes platforms, as well as development and CI/CD tools, databases, incident response tools, IDP, ChatOps products and more. Check the Integrations Catalog for details and to see the latest.

3. Create Access Flows

Create an access flow by answering five questions:

1. 1. Who should get access?
   2. What can they gain access to?
   3. What actions will they be able to perform?
   4. How long should they have the access?
   5. Who must approve the request?

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Fill in the blanks using information from drop-down lists, click Create and you’re done.

Deploying with Slack or Teams

Apono is built with developer experience in mind. With Apono, developers can:

• Request access directly in their favorite tool: Slack, Teams or CLI
• Gain automatic access without waiting for approval if the Access Flow allows it
• Get access details directly in Slack, Teams or CLI and use them with ease
• No more complex forms, old service systems, proxies and clients to install or hackling your IT department when you need to get work done.

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That’s why thousands of engineers use Apono for access requests every month.

Audit and Report on Access

Apono automates access logs and audit reports:

• Every access request and action are fully logged
• Query logs to get exactly what you need, even with our public API
• Create, save, download and schedule reports at will

The Bottom Line

Apono lets you automate static access policies by turning them into declarative, dynamic Access Flows. Integrate your cloud environment, CI/CD stack, cloud infrastructure and databases with Apono. Create Access Flows with our declarative UI or in Terraform, and your developers can use Slack, Teams or CLI to request and approve access.

Protect what matters without breaking a sweat.

Apono is completely self-serve. Try it for yourself and check out the documentation page for in-depth information, use cases and more.