How 9ance replaced shared SSH keys with WarnHack Terminal
9ance, an India-based engineering team, was hitting the same wall every fast-moving team eventually hits: SSH keys passed around the team, no audit trail, and no clean way to revoke access when someone moved on. WarnHack Terminal turned that into a one-evening migration.
Team
Engineering team at 9ance
Use case
Production server access for the team
Outcome
No shared keys; full audit visibility
The challenge
SSH keys, scattered across the team
Like most growing engineering teams, 9ance had reached the point where the original "everyone has their own key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys" pattern stopped scaling. Different engineers had different keys on different servers. Access reviews were a manual chore. When someone moved on, key rotation was a half-day project that often got skipped.
Worse, there was no audit trail. If something on a production server changed unexpectedly, the team could see that something happened — but not who connected, when, or from where. For a team that takes security seriously, that gap was unacceptable.
The switch
Browser-based, role-based, audit-first
9ance moved their team's server access onto WarnHack Terminal in a single evening. Engineers stopped relying on keys-on-laptops and started signing in through the browser. Each team member got a role with the access they actually needed — no more "everyone is root on every box".
Three things changed materially:
Engineers connect from the browser. No SSH client install, no laptop-specific setup — onboarding a new teammate is now a 60-second invite.
Roles replaced shared credentials. Each engineer has the access scope they need; revoking access is a one-click action, no key rotation across machines.
Every session is logged. Who connected, when, from where, for how long. Operational questions that used to take an hour to investigate now take 10 seconds.
"WarnHack Terminal removed the mess around shared SSH keys. Our team can connect from the browser and we finally have proper visibility."
Vivek Vyas
Founder, 9ance
What changed in practice
Operational wins after the switch
Onboarding new engineers
Before: Generate keys, mail them around, edit authorized_keys, hope nothing breaks.
After: Send a WarnHack invite. The engineer is connecting from the browser within minutes.
Offboarding teammates
Before: Manually rotate keys across every server. Often skipped, often risky.
After: One-click revoke. Future logins are denied automatically.
Auditing access
Before: No clear answer to 'who connected when'.
After: Per-user, per-session log accessible in seconds.
Working from anywhere
Before: Engineers tied to a specific laptop with the right key.
After: Browser + login. Production access from any clean device.
Want this for your team?
Most teams replicate the 9ance setup in under an evening. Open the Terminal app or talk to us about your access governance needs.