Seismic Retrofit: User Management and Authentication

As a resident of San Francisco, I’m not a stranger to earthquakes. And like all of us here, I fully understand the importance of making sure that houses built almost a hundred years ago are kept up to modern standards with seismic retrofitting. At the end of the day, this would help us survive another big earthquake if it ever happens.

At Seismic, we follow the same approach by making sure we are deploying the latest and greatest infrastructure and technology to keep our customer tenants performant and secure. We are constantly identifying areas that may need a retrofit and we invest accordingly. Today, I’m happy to share recent improvements to user management and authentication, as well as highlight some of the existing features you may have missed!

New user management API for seamless integrations

The user management API, one of the most requested capabilities, allows our customers to seamlessly integrate Seismic tenants with external systems that they might use such as Okta, Azure AD, or SailPoint. We deliberately decided to follow SCIM protocol to make those integrations easier. The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) specification is designed to make managing user identities in cloud-based applications and services easier. The specification suite seeks to build upon experience with existing schemas and deployments, placing specific emphasis on simplicity of development and integration, while applying existing authentication, authorization, and privacy models. The intent is to reduce the cost and complexity of user management operations by providing a common user schema and extension model, as well as binding documents to provide patterns for exchanging this schema using standard protocols. In essence: make it fast, inexpensive, and easy to move users into, out of, and around the cloud.

Our new user management API allows you to perform all the standard operations you might have had to rely on the UI to do before: create and update users, create and update groups, and assign and remove users from specific groups. You are able to seamlessly keep your users in sync across multiple systems!

Here are some examples of the endpoints we now support.

Existing customers can find the full documentation in our developer portal at https://developer.seismic.com

Managing Users in Bulk Made Easy

While you can build many powerful integrations and tools using our new user management API, some things are just easier and faster to do declaratively. That’s why in addition to the API, we are introducing some basic bulk management capabilities.

Now, tenant administrators can update users and groups by simply importing a .csv file! This is extremely useful when you are setting up your tenant for the first time, or after any major organizational changes.

You can also export existing users and groups from the tenant into a .csv file.

This feature is currently in early access; please contact your CSM to try it out.

Customizable Login Pages

Last, but not least, we are excited to share our progress toward fully-customizable login pages. We understand that the login experience is the first impression a user will have of Seismic and we want to make sure it’s as smooth and tailored to your company’s needs as possible.

With a new, early access feature, you now can customize background and logo images that are being displayed on the login screen, so you have a consistent branding experience across your company.

We have even more exciting things coming your way from supporting multiple SSO login flows from a single screen to fully customizable login pages where you can set the template and locations of page elements.