Causal implements on-demand access in under a day with Indent

Industry: B2B SaaS
Employees: 50 - 100
Raised: $24.2m

Stack

2% of the time

privileged access is provisioned

with self-serve access

18 engineers

average access wait time

1 min

Causal is a platform that empowers hundreds of organizations to create, simulate, and visualize financial models with ease and precision. It enables teams like Philips, Kandji, and Marley Spoon to make informed decisions, plan for contingencies, and chart their course through uncertain terrain.

Enterprise grade security for Causal is non-negotiable. The majority of their team come from large, multinational companies where security was paramount. Their CTO, Lukas Köbis formerly worked at WhatsApp and brought that culture with him to Causal, making security a priority from the start.

“For a company that deals with financial data, security isn't something you start thinking about when you reach a certain threshold; it's the foundation you lay at the very beginning and continuously reinforce.”

-Lukas Köbis, CTO, Causal

Key Takeaways

Implemented time-bound, role based, auditable GCP access in an afternoon
Causal engineers can request access via CLI, as well as Slack and web, allowing them to stay in their flow

Problem

Automating Best Practices

Causal was growing. After raising their Series A they added significant headcount and were supporting a rapidly expanding customer base.

CTO of Causal, Lukas Köbis, saw this as an opportunity to implement on-demand access control for their cloud apps and infrastructure.

Least privilege access is the gold standard. Our team was growing to a size though where manually adding and removing permissions constantly wasn’t going to be sustainable. So we needed a way to automate our access workflows and add a dimension of time-boundedness for not just the resources our engineers need everyday, but also our break glass account.

-Lukas Köbis

CTO, Causal

Solution

On-demand Access with Indent

Causal wanted a solution that would let them implement on-demand access quickly with the least amount of disruption to their team. They were able to get on-demand Google Cloud production access set up in a single afternoon with Indent.

Once Indent was rolled out to their team, it provided a night and day difference for the engineers on the front line like João Monteiro.

"From a DevOps and management point of view, Indent has been a game changer. It's quick and easy to request access to our various permissioned resources. The Slack integration makes it a natural part of our day to day workflow and the ability to re-request access to an auto expired resource makes it a breeze."

-João Monteiro, Software Engineer, Causal

By using on-demand access, Causal was able to increase the security of their systems by reducing the amount of time any member of the team had privileged access to Google Cloud to just 2%.

Beyond integrating Indent into their workflows, Causal engineers have been able to work closely with the Indent team, providing a tight feedback loop and helping to shape features like the Indent access CLI.

I like to keep my hands on my keyboard as much as possible. It’s great to be able to just enter `access` in my terminal and have everything there to request access without having to jump back and forth several times a day to get access to different systems.
João Monteiro

Software Engineer, Causal

What's Next

Securing an expanding stack

Causal isn’t done growing. Their stack continues to expand to meet the needs of their team and customers. As their resource surface area increases, Indent will play an important role in Causal keep their agility without having to sacrifice on security.

We’ve always been able to move really quickly which is one of our strengths. Indent helps us enable that as we scale.
Lukas Köbis

CTO, Causal

Get started for free →