Applied Intuition’s Journey to Stronger Security and Seamless Developer Operations

Read full article here: https://www.p0.dev/blog/applied-intuition-success-story/?utm_source=nhimg

Applied Intuition is at the forefront of autonomous vehicle technology, providing advanced simulation software and infrastructure tools to accelerate the safe deployment of self-driving systems. With cloud-heavy development workflows and sensitive customer environments in AWS, maintaining a secure, compliant, and efficient access model was a growing challenge.

Patrick Young, Director of IT and Security at Applied Intuition, explains:

“Our cloud infrastructure team uses P0 to automate access escalations for AWS resources, including customer environments and sensitive policies. It is a critical part of our security stack and helps control developer access to sensitive cloud resources — a key SOC2 requirement. Prior to P0, our infrastructure teams manually processed access grants using JIRA tickets. P0 has automated all the toil around provisioning and de-provisioning, ensuring no developer has standing access to privileged resources. This also helps increase our customers’ trust in us.”

The Challenge: Balancing Security, Compliance, and Speed

As Applied Intuition scaled, several operational and security challenges emerged around IAM and cloud access:

1. Operational Overhead
   Before P0, access requests were manually processed via JIRA tickets, emails, or Slack messages. At peak times, the infrastructure team handled 50+ requests per week — all while juggling critical projects. This was time-consuming, error-prone, and unsustainable for a fast-growing company.
2. Over-Provisioned Access
   Developers occasionally retained access to privileged customer environments longer than intended. In a high-growth environment, these standing privileges became a compliance risk and a potential threat to customer trust.
3. Poor Developer Experience
   Manual approvals often took hours, which was especially painful for on-call engineers responding to production incidents in the middle of the night. Delays in access impacted response time and productivity.

Applied needed a solution that was secure, auditable, and fast, without adding friction to their engineers’ workflows.

The Solution: P0 Security for Just-In-Time Cloud Access

The Applied team adopted P0 to automate and streamline their IAM processes. Onboarding was simple: a single hour-long Zoom call, after which their cloud infrastructure team used P0 documentation to configure the platform to their exact needs.

Key features include:

Just-In-Time Access to Privileged Customer Environments - Engineers gain temporary access to AWS permission sets and policies for customer environments only when needed, automatically revoked after the session ends.

Access to Sensitive AWS Resources - P0 enables temporary access to sensitive AWS resources, including pre-built managed policies for Lambda, S3, and other critical services, without permanent over-provisioning.

Slack Integration - Engineers request and approve access directly from Slack, reducing context-switching and making the process intuitive and fast.

On-Call Automation via PagerDuty - P0 integrates with PagerDuty to grant automated, instant access for on-call engineers. When a critical alert fires, access is provisioned without waiting for human approval, minimizing downtime and response time.

The Impact: Faster, Safer, Smarter Access

P0 transformed Applied Intuition’s IAM workflow in several tangible ways:

1- Improved Developer Experience - Access request resolution times dropped from hours to minutes. On-call engineers now receive access instantly through PagerDuty integration, allowing them to respond to incidents without friction.

2- Enhanced Security Posture - Automating temporary access reduced standing privileges, minimized human error, and ensured that no engineer retained access beyond their approved window. This strengthened compliance with SOC2 requirements and boosted overall cloud security.

3- Reduced Operational Overhead - Infrastructure teams no longer manually approve or revoke access for dozens of requests each week. P0 handled the heavy lifting, allowing them to focus on strategic projects instead of repetitive IAM tasks.

Conclusion: Secure Access Without Sacrificing Speed

Applied Intuition’s partnership with P0 demonstrates how automation can solve the dual challenge of security and developer productivity. By combining just-in-time access, temporary permissions, and workflow integrations, P0 allows engineering teams to move fast without compromising control or compliance.

In the fast-moving world of autonomous vehicle development, access to sensitive cloud resources can no longer be a bottleneck — with P0, it becomes secure, instant, and auditable.