Faster, Smarter Access with Border0

For fast-moving engineering teams, the pace of innovation is everything. Infrastructure access should never slow them down -- it should move as seamlessly as the code they ship. Riskified, a leader in eCommerce fraud prevention, found that their previous access solution was holding them back. By adopting Border0, they gained a partner that works at their speed, delivering effortless, secure, and cost-effective access that empowers engineers to focus on what they do best: building and shipping.

The Challenge: A Complex Environment with a Static Solution

Riskified’s engineering environment is vast and constantly evolving, spanning hundreds of databases, Kubernetes clusters, and SSH targets. Their previous access management platform, StrongDM, simply couldn’t keep pace, creating mounting frustration across the team.

The challenges piled up:

• Feature Lag: Updates couldn’t keep up with Riskified’s evolving stack. Critical capabilities were slow to arrive, leaving engineers waiting.
• Rising Costs: Despite limited agility, prices kept climbing, forcing Riskified to pay more for less.
• Operational Friction: Engineers often relied on manual workarounds and “localhost tricks” just to stay productive, adding toil and risk.

“Responsiveness with our previous vendor wasn’t very good. We’re dynamic and adding technologies, but the solution just wasn’t keeping up,” shared Riskified's SRE.

The Switch: Coverage at the Speed of Engineering

When Riskified began searching for a new solution, they came with a comprehensive checklist. Border0 stood out immediately by meeting all core requirements on day one: seamless access to databases, Kubernetes, and SSH targets with fine-grained, just-in-time access policies.
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“Border0 ticked all our requirements from the start.”
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Beyond ticking the boxes, Border0 showed a rare willingness to co-innovate. Riskified needed Kubernetes impersonation to maintain their established model, and Border0’s team partnered closely to build and ship the feature almost immediately. The “blindingly fast” turnaround reinforced that Border0 wasn’t just a vendor, but a true engineering partner moving at Riskified’s speed.
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Another thing that made the switch a no-brainer? Border0's mature Terraform provider, which fit directly into Riskified’s Infrastructure-as-Code workflows. This allowed the team to manage the entire access layer programmatically -- from policy creation to user onboarding -- eliminating manual configuration and ensuring consistency.

The Impact: Better, Faster, Cheaper

Switching to Border0 delivered immediate improvements across three dimensions:
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• Better: A unified, web-based client simplified access to all resources. Features like SSO, expiring policies, and Kubernetes impersonation ensured a secure, audited, and smooth experience. The Terraform provider automated provisioning end-to-end, reducing manual effort and errors
• Faster: Border0’s responsiveness was unmatched -- feature requests shipped in hours, not weeks, and the process was collaborative
• Cheaper: Riskified gained broader coverage and higher velocity at a materially lower total cost of ownership, without the compromises of their old platform

Seamless Rollout and Enhanced Visibility

Migration projects often create stress, but Riskified’s rollout was effortless. Border0 scaled to several hundred users in just days, with leadership noting how unusually frictionless the migration was.
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With Border0 in place, access became predictable and audited by default. Engineers no longer wasted time on workarounds, and platform teams no longer had to manage complex per-cluster Kubernetes policies.
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Visibility also improved dramatically. Border0’s comprehensive logs and automated session insights were streamed into Riskified’s S3 bucket, enabling deeper analysis of access activity. With Border0's AI Session Insights, the Riskified team had an easy way to identify any high-risk or anomolous sessions.

The Takeaway: Access as an Enabler

Access is foundational to engineering productivity. When it’s slow and clunky, it holds teams back. When it’s seamless and reliable, it becomes a force multiplier.
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For Riskified, Border0 transformed access from a source of frustration into a strategic enabler—empowering engineers to move faster, strengthening security, and lowering costs.
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If your current solution can’t keep pace with your team’s growth, Border0 may be the partner you need to unlock speed, simplicity, and scale.