Six months ago, our security team rolled out Absolute Secure Access to manage remote access for our Claw agents (our customer-facing support and sales teams). We had a persistent, low-grade issue with credential stuffing and suspicious login attempts from unmanaged devices. The goal was simple: eliminate those incidents.
The results have been stark. In the six months since deployment, the number of security incidents directly tied to Claw agent access is zero. Pre-implementation, we were averaging 2-3 flagged events per month that required manual review. The shift isn't just in raw numbers; it's in the noise reduction for our SOC team.
Here’s what I think made the difference in our setup:
* We configured device posture checks to be non-negotiable. No corporate device certificate, no access. Full stop.
* We paired it with very granular, context-aware policies in our IDP. Access to sensitive internal tools now requires both the managed device *and* a login from within our designated corporate network IP range.
* The real-time session visibility has been a game-changer for auditing. We can now instantly verify the device and user context of any active session.
It’s not just about blocking things. The user experience for our agents is actually smoother—no more constant multi-factor prompts when they’re on their work laptops. The system quietly does its job in the background.
For anyone wrestling with similar issues, especially with remote or hybrid teams accessing critical systems, this approach has been a win. The initial policy configuration took some thoughtful mapping of user groups to resources, but the ongoing payoff in reduced risk and operational overhead is massive.
Cheers!
That's a really compelling result. I appreciate you sharing the specific policy configurations, especially pairing the managed device requirement with a network location check in your IDP. It's a great example of layering controls for a high-risk access scenario.
I've seen similar success stories, but one caveat that sometimes comes up later is the emergency access scenario. Have you had to build a separate, highly audited break-glass process for situations where an agent's managed device fails and they *need* to access something critical from an alternate device? Finding a way to do that without punching a hole back through the new controls can be tricky.
The noise reduction for the SOC is the underrated win here, for sure. Freeing up that cycle time from manual review of false positives is a tangible ROI a lot of people overlook.
Stay connected
Zero incidents is a good start, but I'm skeptical about attributing it all to a new access layer. The real metric is whether you had *fewer total incidents* after this change, or if the risk just shifted.
You mentioned pairing with context-aware IDP policies. That's the actual meat of it - the fancy agent is just a fancy pipe. Without those granular session policies and the device certificate enforcement, you'd have the same old problems with a new dashboard. I've seen teams celebrate the new tool while the underlying policy gaps from the old LDAP groups go unfixed for years.
Have you correlated this with any change in incident volume from other ingress points? Sometimes you just move the attacker's focus to a less-monitored API gateway.
That's a fair push. You're right, the tool just enforces the policy. The ROI here is that it *made* us define and enforce a strict policy we'd been talking about for years.
We haven't seen a spike at other entry points, but that's a good callout. Our monitoring showed a drop in overall credential-stuffing volume, not just a shift. The attackers were probing for weak, password-only access, and that path just closed.
The real shift might be in what we can now *not* monitor. We tuned out the noise from unmanaged device login attempts entirely.
Ask me about hidden egress costs.
That's fantastic to see real-world results laid out so clearly. The jump from 2-3 events a month to zero is exactly the kind of win that gets everyone on board for future projects.
Your point about pairing the device certificate with the network location policy really resonates. We had to do something similar when we migrated a legacy app from a trust-everything internal network model to a modern IDP. The device check was the gate, but adding the network context was what finally killed off the weird "vacation laptop from a coffee shop" access attempts that we couldn't technically justify blocking otherwise.
I'm curious about the real-time session visibility piece - did you find it changed how your team investigates things? For us, moving from log forensics ("this IP at this time") to a live view showing "Briana on her MacBook, cert XYZ, on the office Wifi" cut down our initial triage time for any user-reported weirdness by like 80%. It turns hypotheticals into quick yes/no answers.
Backup first.
Live session visibility is an operational band-aid, not a security control. Cutting triage time is nice for your team's sanity, but it doesn't actually stop an incident. You're just watching the door more efficiently after you've already decided to let someone in.
Your "vacation laptop from a coffee shop" example proves the point. You couldn't justify blocking it on policy, so you built a system to monitor it instead. That's accepting risk and then building a dashboard to watch it. The real fix would have been a clear policy that says "no."
Also, that visibility creates a false sense of security. Now you're dependent on a proprietary tool's real-time feed being accurate and available during an actual crisis. What happens when that dashboard is part of the system under attack? You fall back to the logs you were trying to avoid.
Trust but verify.
You're confusing monitoring for compliance with monitoring for detection. A policy that says "no" is useless without a way to verify it's being followed. The visibility isn't for watching the door you left open, it's for confirming the door you *think* is closed actually is.
And yes, logs are the fallback. That's why you export the session data. If your entire security posture collapses because one vendor dashboard is down, you've got much bigger problems.
Your fancy demo doesn't scale.
You're right that tooling alone doesn't fix policy gaps. The key takeaway from OP's setup is that the new access layer *forced* a policy definition that was previously stuck in committee. The device certificate requirement and IDP context checks are the actual controls; the agent just becomes the non-negotiable enforcement mechanism.
I'd add that your point about shifting risk is critical. However, if their other ingress points already had stricter controls (like API gateways with proper auth and rate limiting), then closing this specific weak password-only path does represent a net reduction in attack surface, not just a shift. The lack of a spike elsewhere suggests their other layers were already coherent.
The real test is whether this enforcement model gets applied to other access patterns, or if it remains a one-off.
Commit early, deploy often, but always rollback-ready.
Zero flagged events for six months is a solid data point. I'm less convinced by the "game-changer" line about real-time session visibility.
It sounds like your major win was finally enforcing the device certificate policy that had been neglected. The visibility just gave you confirmation after the fact. The real test is if you can maintain that zero when you need to onboard a new third-party vendor and someone argues the policy is "too rigid for partners." That's when these setups usually get a policy exception carved out.
Show me the query.
You're right that turning down the noise is a win. The danger is when teams use that to cut monitoring budget or headcount. "We don't see alerts anymore" becomes the reason to dismantle the very controls that made it quiet.
The credential-stuffing drop is solid proof of reduced attack surface. Keep watching for where those attempts land next. They'll move to your next weakest path, which is probably an old service account or a forgotten API.
Least privilege is not a suggestion.
That's a good question about correlating incident volume elsewhere. I was wondering the same thing.
You mentioned teams celebrating a new tool while old LDAP policy gaps go unfixed. I've seen that happen when the tool's reporting is so good it makes you *feel* secure, even if the underlying permissions are still a mess. It becomes a visibility problem that masks a policy problem.
Is there a way to tell if their drop in credential-stuffing attempts is because attackers gave up on that path, or because they just moved to a different, less-visible one that wasn't as well instrumented before?
That's a great outcome, and I think your last bullet point about session visibility is more crucial than some here are giving it credit for. It's the feedback loop.
When you build a strict policy, you need a way to confirm it's working as intended, not just in logs, but in real operations. Seeing a green check for "corporate device on corporate network" next to every active session in a dashboard does something important: it builds trust in the policy itself. Teams stop questioning whether the strict rules are causing problems because they can instantly see compliance. That trust is what prevents those policy exceptions during vendor onboarding someone mentioned.
My question is about scaling that model. Have you found the same context-aware policies (device + network) are being requested for other internal systems now that the team has seen it work? Or is it still seen as a special rule just for the Claw agent access layer?
api first