Case Study: Coursera achieves secure, streamlined access management with ScaleFT

How An EdTech Pioneer Moved Beyond SSH Keys

Coursera, the online learning leader serving more than 25 million learners, needed a better way to manage privileged access across a complex AWS environment. As its infrastructure grew, provisioning SSH keys and managing access through custom bastions became increasingly burdensome, creating friction for a team focused on developer productivity and low-ops operations. To address this, Coursera turned to ScaleFT for modern access control and auditing.

ScaleFT provided a simpler, easier-to-deploy solution for SSH access, role-based permissions, and auditing across Coursera’s autoscaling infrastructure. Coursera deployed ScaleFT in about a week, used its API and URL Handler to streamline workflows, and improved access granularity while reducing the need to manage authorization infrastructure themselves. The result was faster troubleshooting, stronger security visibility, and a more seamless developer experience.

Coursera

David Guo

Software Engineer