Data Engineering Podcast | Justin McCarthy

by Schuyler Brown

Chairman of the Board

StrongDM

2 min read

Last updated on: January 31, 2024

Found in: Security Podcasts

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Data Engineering Podcast | Justin McCarthy

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About This Episode‍

Controlling access to a database is a solved problem… right? It can be straightforward for small teams and a small number of storage engines, but once either or both of those start to scale then things quickly become complex and difficult to manage. After years of running across the same issues in numerous companies and even more projects Justin McCarthy built StrongDM to solve database access management for everyone. In this episode he explains how the StrongDM proxy works to grant and audit access to storage systems and the benefits that it provides to engineers and team leads.

About Justin McCarthy

Justin McCarthy is the co-founder and CTO of StrongDM, the database authentication platform. He has spent his entire career building highly scalable software. As CTO of Rafter, he processed transactions worth over $1B collectively. He also led the engineering teams at Preact, the predictive churn analytics platform, and Cafe Press.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Justin McCarthy about StrongDM, a hosted service that simplifies access controls for your data

Interview

Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you start by explaining the problem that StrongDM is solving and how the company got started?
What are some of the most common challenges around managing access and authentication for data storage systems?
What are some of the most interesting workarounds that you have seen?
Which areas of authentication, authorization, and auditing are most commonly overlooked or misunderstood?
Can you describe the architecture of your system?
What strategies have you used to enable interfacing with such a wide variety of storage systems?
What additional capabilities do you provide beyond what is natively available in the underlying systems?
What are some of the most difficult aspects of managing varying levels of permission for different roles across the diversity of platforms that you support, given that they each have different capabilities natively?
For a customer who is onboarding, what is involved in setting up your platform to integrate with their systems?
What are some of the assumptions that you made about your problem domain and market when you first started which have been disproven?
How do organizations in different industries react to your product and how do their policies around granting access to data differ?
What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and growing StrongDM?

‍

About the Author

Schuyler Brown, Chairman of the Board, began working with startups as one of the first employees at Cross Commerce Media. Since then, he has worked at the venture capital firms DFJ Gotham and High Peaks Venture Partners. He is also the host of Founders@Fail and author of Inc.com's "Failing Forward" column, where he interviews veteran entrepreneurs about the bumps, bruises, and reality of life in the startup trenches. His leadership philosophy: be humble enough to realize you don’t know everything and curious enough to want to learn more. He holds a B.A. and M.B.A. from Columbia University. To contact Schuyler, visit him on LinkedIn.

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