Why Infrastructure Access is the New Strategic Priority for DevOps Teams
April 12, 2022

Cameron Delano
strongDM

DevOps teams are dealing with more complex issues than ever before — but do you ever feel like you're spending too much time bogged down with the mundane details of infrastructure access?

When DevOps professionals can't get easy, secure access to the systems and platforms that they need to do their jobs, the entire organization's productivity suffers.

Good news: you're not alone. A recent survey found that most organizations are struggling with these same problems — and infrastructure access is becoming a new strategic priority.

strongDM recently commissioned a survey of 600 DevOps professionals, called 2022: The Year of Access. The survey respondents told us that in the next 12 months, 80% of organizations are looking to address access management as a strategic initiative.

Let's take a closer look at the landscape of access management and see why this topic has become top-of-mind for DevOps leaders as they look to stay agile and keep delivering high-quality code as efficiently as possible.

Access Management Is More Complicated Than Ever Before

Legacy access management presents several complex challenges. Many organizations are combining legacy approaches with new technologies in a way that causes confusion or duplicated effort. Some are still using manual processes or requiring multiple approvals in a way that runs counter to operational efficiencies.

The survey found a few troubling trends that illustrate why access management has become so complicated:

■ 93% of organizations' technical staff have access to sensitive infrastructure

■ 60% of respondents have access challenges with cloud providers

■ 57% have access challenges with databases, data centers, and servers

Access management has become more time-consuming, especially for fast-growing organizations. 41% of survey respondents said that gathering evidence for compliance is a top challenge. 88% of organizations require two or more employees to review and approve access requests, which might require days or weeks to fulfill.

Other big challenges identified by the survey of DevOps professionals include: time required to request and grant access (mentioned by 52% of respondents), and the task of assigning, rotating, and tracking credentials (51%).

Less Than Best Practices for Access Management? Hello Security Risk

The complexity and time-consuming effort of access management is leading some teams to take shortcuts in a way that might compromise their organization's security. Unfortunately, the survey found that many organizations are using unsecure practices for access management:

■ 65% of organizations use shared logins

■ 42% use shared SSH keys

At the other extreme, some organizations are requiring lengthy processes to grant access, which can hinder workforce productivity. 53% of organizations take hours to weeks before infrastructure access can be granted; 88% of organizations require 2 or more people to grant and approve access, and 25% require 4 or more people to approve.

Best Practices for the Future of Access Management

As organizations adopt more advanced systems like Kubernetes, embrace security initiatives like Zero Trust, and grow the size of their teams, they're going to need a better approach to access management.

As modern infrastructure becomes more complicated, access management needs to be safer and simpler, in a way that works for the entire team, including:

■ Simplified access with one control plane

■ Reduction of provisioning time while maintaining SOC 2-compliant auditing

■ One credential per person

■ Visibility and automatic logging of every single backend activity

Today's DevOps teams demand better ways of managing access to infrastructure. With the right approach, it's possible for organizations to maintain a high level of security while simplifying their team's access for more operational efficiencies across the stack as well as protect your systems and drive results for all of your other strategic goals.

Cameron Delano is Sr. Solutions Architect at strongDM
Share this

Industry News

June 12, 2025

Oracle has expanded its collaboration with NVIDIA to help customers streamline the development and deployment of production-ready AI, develop and run next-generation reasoning models and AI agents, and access the computing resources needed to further accelerate AI innovation.

June 12, 2025

Datadog launched its Internal Developer Portal (IDP) built on live observability data.

June 12, 2025

Azul and Chainguard announced a strategic partnership that will unite Azul’s commercial support and curated OpenJDK distributions with Chainguard’s Linux distro, software factory and container images.

June 11, 2025

SmartBear launched Reflect Mobile featuring HaloAI, expanding its no-code, GenAI-powered test automation platform to include native mobile apps.

June 11, 2025

ArmorCode announced the launch of AI Code Insights.

June 11, 2025

Codiac announced the release of Codiac 2.5, a major update to its unified automation platform for container orchestration and Kubernetes management.

June 10, 2025

Harness Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is releasing major upgrades and new features built to address challenges developers face daily, ultimately giving them more time back for innovation.

June 10, 2025

Azul announced an enhancement to Azul Intelligence Cloud, a breakthrough capability in Azul Vulnerability Detection that brings precision to detection of Java application security vulnerabilities.

June 10, 2025

ZEST Security announced its strategic integration with Upwind, giving DevOps and Security teams real-time, runtime powered cloud visibility combined with intelligent, Agentic AI-driven remediation.

June 09, 2025

Google announced an upgraded preview of Gemini 2.5 Pro, its most intelligent model yet.

June 09, 2025

iTmethods and Coder have partnered to bring enterprises a new way to deploy secure, high-performance and AI-ready Cloud Development Environments (CDEs).

June 09, 2025

Gearset announced the expansion of its new Observability functionality to include Flow and Apex error monitoring.

June 05, 2025

Postman announced new capabilities that make it dramatically easier to design, test, deploy, and monitor AI agents and the APIs they rely on.

June 05, 2025

Opsera announced the expansion of its partnership with Databricks.