Modern Treasury scales engineering with on-demand access in under a minute

Industry: Fintech
Employees: 50 - 250
Raised: $183m

Stack

40+ engineers

with temporary access

with time-bound production access

Simplified SOC 2 compliance

reconcile $2 billion every month

Modern Treasury helps their customers

Modern Treasury is a fintech company founded in 2018 that moves over $2 billion dollars a month for their customers. Naturally, security is of utmost importance to them. An early priority for Sam Aarons, the CTO, was SOC 2 compliance. As a part of the audit process, Sam began to think about how Modern Treasury was handling admin permissions within their production AWS accounts.

At the time, their accounts had only two roles: admin and read-only. When Matt McFarland, an Engineering Manager at Modern Treasury joined the company, all engineers were automatically granted admin permissions as part of their onboarding.

Key Takeaways

Reduced median access approval wait times from 3 days to 59 seconds
Deployed Indent, Okta and AWS SSO then onboarded team within days
Shared visibility and review workload for on-demand production access

Problem

Lost engineering time waiting for production AWS access

Modern Treasury wanted to do more to secure their customer data, so the policy was updated. Engineers then needed to message Sam to be granted temporary admin access to production accounts. This slowed Matt’s team down, and permissions were inconsistently revoked after the task had been completed.

After two years of that workflow and facing the need to support an on-call rotation, Matt needed to find a better long-term solution to automate access control and simplify SOC 2 compliance.

... to empower your team to move quickly and to tackle issues that they see of their own volition and of their own energy, you need to give them the right tools.
Matt McFarland

Engineering Manager at Modern Treasury

Solution

On-demand production access with Indent

After comparing the available solutions, Indent was chosen not only because it could solve an acute pain point for Matt’s engineers, but also because it was capable of simplifying access control across the entire company.

This is really an identity management problem. There are other companies that get at this problem around privileged access in an orthogonal way, like internal tool builders or runbook automation…Indent was the only company that I found that passed any sort of smell test about how to manage a request, link, expire – rinse and repeat workflow.

Sam was able to set up Indent over a weekend. Through the process he was able to work closely with engineers at Indent to ensure the configurations of Modern Treasury’s Okta account were aligned with best practices.

All forty of Modern Treasury’s engineers are now using Indent and have experienced a significant reduction in wait time to gain production access. Matt’s team before Indent would normally wait three days to get the access they needed. Today their median wait time is fifty-nine seconds.

We're not actually blocking them. Like fifty-nine seconds is shorter than it takes to boot up a local rails server sometimes. So that's amazing to me that it's so on demand that anyone can access it and Sam's not spending any time managing roles.
Matt McFarland

Engineering Manager at Modern Treasury

What's Next

Securing access for the entire company with Indent

By bringing in Indent, Matt was able to empower his engineering team with faster production access while also reducing his CTO’s workload to maintain SOC 2 compliance. Matt has seen Indent become a very important part of Modern Treasury’s stack. They are now looking to expand their usage of Indent to other non-production instances and outside of the engineering team. The Indent workflow is designed to be approachable for non-technical teams, making it a solution that is flexible enough to be utilized across the entire company.

Our critical software providers are listed on one hand and Indent is one of them. It's worked so well that we're very confident in rolling that out to more of the company.

Our critical software providers are listed on one hand and Indent is one of them. It's worked so well that we're very confident in rolling that out to more of the company.
Matt McFarland

Engineering Manager at Modern Treasury

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