Advances in technology and emergency situations, like the COVID-19 public health crisis, have renewed interest in, and adoption of, SSH.
Businesses not only are moving to the cloud, but they are using a plethora of cloud-based PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS platforms. At the same time, they still have many legacy, business-oriented applications hosted on-premise. In this hybrid, multi-cloud environment, the biggest challenge is how to maintain a robust and effective Identity and Access Management (IAM) system.
Traditional password-based authentication mechanisms no longer work, and wherever they are present, they are the sources of fog and friction, leading to numerous data breaches or incidents because of credential abuse.
On the other hand, DevOps leverages native, well-known tools and processes in an agile and iterative fashion in teams that are self-sufficient and capable of rapid and frequent, even daily, code releases. Despite
the obvious advantages of a highly automated, high-frequency release cycle, there are challenges to be met, especially with securing the software being released. Businesses need to ensure the delivery of applications and updates that have not been tampered or altered by malicious actors to serve as Trojan Horses when installed in the end-user devices.
Finally, the COVID-19 crisis has forced millions of employees to work from their home, using their own devices and accessing corporate assets through their home Wi-Fis. The IT security teams are faced with numerous new challenges: how do you enforce a strong authentication scheme to ensure that only authorized people and devices access mission sensitive assets?
For all the above modern challenges, the SSH protocol serves as the modern solution. In DevOps, SSH is the fundamental secure building block that enables the rapid, frequent, and highly automated build and release process favored by DevOps. In multi-cloud and remote working environments, SSH protocol offers the solution for a passwordless access management, capable of a single-sign-on (SSO), frictionless experience. SSH can also be used for issuing just-in-time, ephemeral certificates, that expire when the authorization is over.
Using SSH together with IAM automation platforms, organizations can strengthen their authentication schemes not only for the privileged users (PAM), but for every employee and/or device requesting access to corporate assets.
