Product Updates

New: Secure and Control Your PubNub Account with SAML SSO

4 min read Marta Lorenc on Nov 30, 2020

Supporting best-practices for security, compliance, and team organization

At PubNub, we know that the success of our customers comes from making it as easy as possible to operate and use our product. That’s why we’re on a mission to continually improve our offerings based on the needs and feedback of our customers.

One of the most consistent requests we receive is for more ways to control access to the PubNub portal. This is because the portal is at the heart of how customers operate PubNub, offering access to API keys, usage statistics, feature settings, and more. Because the portal is so central, it’s important that teams can easily access it, and control that access to prevent unauthorized changes. 

In response to this need for greater access control, we’re excited to announce our new support for single sign-on in the PubNub portal using custom domains. With this release, your admin and security teams can now configure access to PubNub through their SAML identity provider of choice, whether that’s Okta, Onelogin, Azure AD, or any other SAML IdP. 

As a result, your admins will have the ability to freely and centrally control PubNub access for individual users within their existing access control suite. Moreover, credentialed personnel will be able to quickly and securely access your PubNub information and settings, without any additional need to manage permissions. All of this means improved security, organizational clarity, and ease of operation of PubNub across your organization.

Security and accountability for sensitive use-cases

When it comes to securing your application, the first step is to ensure that only authorized personnel can access and alter vital information and settings, like those available through the PubNub portal. This is especially true for many enterprise teams, which often instate internal security protocols that limit access to a select few users. It’s also important for companies with regulatory needs, like those building telemedicine or fintech solutions. These teams need to comply with laws that require robust and verifiable access management to protect access to sensitive user information. SSO is a common solution to these access-based security needs. 

In response, our new SSO support upholds security and accountability from an organizational perspective by giving internal admins control over the services that personnel can log in to on behalf of their company. This protects application stability by ensuring that only authorized users can access, view, or change PubNub settings, and establishes a clear point of contact if problems arise.

For companies with compliance requirements, this lets you easily and verifiably manage access to PubNub. As a result, whether complying with internal security requirements or those mandated by regulations, it’s now easier than ever to ensure security and accountability for your PubNub account. 

Organizational clarity for large teams

On large teams, it can be difficult to maintain a clear picture of account ownership, and to know who can access sensitive settings like your PubNub configuration. This picture can get even more complex when personnel changes, teams shift, and permissions need to be updated for multiple users. Tracking down and fixing access issues can burden admin teams, who often have a central solution that otherwise allows them to manage the majority of vendor services. 

Our new SSO support reduces the burden on your admin team by integrating PubNub into the centralized permissions solution they already use. This means that admins can apply the same controls to PubNub that they use for other services. And, by letting admins control access centrally, this release eliminates the need to manage PubNub credentials on an account-by-account basis.

This gives everybody a clear picture of who has access to PubNub and why, and makes sure that hand-offs go smoothly whenever permissions need to change. With our SSO support, customers can now confidently manage PubNub access for many users without worrying about friction from account loss or personnel change. 

Operate PubNub with best-practices for team management

Above all, we understand that the hardest part of building a successful product is operating it effectively, and that includes managing the way your team members access and modify key services like PubNub. As your product, team, and organization evolves, it’s important that you’re able to maintain security, accountability, and control with as little overhead as possible.

By enabling central control over PubNub permissions, this release helps you operate PubNub over the long-term by reducing overhead and making it easy to ensure security, accountability, and clarity throughout your organization.

For teams with regulatory requirements, this greatly simplifies achieving both compliance itself and the audit-readiness that comes with it. In all, our SSO support lets you bring PubNub into your admin teams’ workflow, helping you smoothly access and operate our service no matter how your team grows. 


Get access to SSO for PubNub

Overall, our new SSO support marks another step in PubNub’s commitment to improving our offering end-to-end, not just for those working hands-on with code, but also for your admin, IT, and security teams who work to keep your sensitive settings and information safe. 

PubNub SSO support is now available. If your team could benefit from SSO support, get in touch with us. We will help you configure your account with your identity provider of choice, and get you up and running with SSO today.