Notion, founded in 2013, serves over 100 million users worldwide with 1,200 employees and has raised more than $350M in funding.
Challenge
Access Control Complexity
Hundreds of developers needed database access across 100+ RDS instances, making permission management and activity monitoring difficult.
Lack of Centralized Visibility
Security teams pieced together logs from multiple sources to answer basic questions about query execution, slowing investigations and increasing risk.
Inadequate Existing Solutions
Native cloud tools and internal solutions lacked robust policy layers, proved difficult to scale, and demanded significant engineering resources.
Solution
Policy-Driven Access Control
Implemented short-lived credentials, fine-grained policies, and centralized monitoring for secure developer access.
Seamless Developer Experience
Single-binary deployment and API-first design enabled rollout in under a week with zero developer friction.
Unified Visibility Platform
Formal became the centralized data-access operating system, providing real-time visibility, faster investigations, and malicious query prevention across hundreds of datastores.
"We evaluated against other vendors as well as potentially solving this internally ourselves. Solving this problem internally was just way too much of a lift and the native tooling that was available within our cloud provider just didn't cut it. We did a vendor bakeoff between a number of products and Formal came out on top."
— Daniel Pyykonen, Head of Security Engineering at Notion
"The ROI was pretty significant for Formal because it would've cost us hundreds of hours to develop our own. With Formal, we were able to almost instantaneously deploy something that gave us visibility into what we had difficulty seeing before and preventative measures that we desperately wanted to instill in our ecosystem."
— Daniel Pyykonen, Head of Security Engineering at Notion
"What's nice is that the developers who are using it don't even notice that they're using it. So it's working very seamlessly into our system. It's working in the background and it's not impacting developer velocity."
— Michelle Parent, Security Engineer at Notion
Results
- Deployed within days with minimal disruption
- Eliminated broad, long-lived permissions through fine-grained, group-based rules
- Achieved centralized visibility previously requiring manual log correlation
- Maintained or improved developer velocity despite new security controls
- Enabled compliance with enterprise customer requirements
- Avoided hundreds of engineering hours required for internal development
Key Implementation Details
- Integration with Okta for JIT (just-in-time) access
- Terraform and ECS compatibility
- Logs flowing to Notion's SIEM
- Short-lived credentials via Okta automation
- Lightweight proxy architecture