With Cerby, you have a secure and controlled way to collaborate with external parties, such as contractors, agencies, vendors, and clients, through Partners.
This feature helps you and your company support sharing access to your items and Apps with collaborators who don't belong to your domain and don’t have access to your Cerby workspace via an account provisioned by your identity provider (IdP).
After adding a partner to your Cerby workspace, access of external collaborators to items and seat-based and paid social apps is centrally managed through Cerby, providing your company complete control over the items and apps and visibility into their usage.
Figure 1 shows the Partners view in the Cerby web app dashboard, where you can manage your partnerships.
Figure 1. Partners view in the Cerby web app dashboard
Currently, Cerby supports the following ways to add and collaborate with your partners:
The following sections describe each way.
Host-guest partnership
The host-guest partnership enables you to establish a secure connection between an existing host workspace and a guest workspace created for this purpose. Through this connection, you can share accounts with external collaborators.
With this partnership, Cerby introduces the following roles:
Partnership Owner: It is the user from the host workspace who adds the partnership. They are granted this role automatically after adding the partnership, and they can perform management tasks over the partnership. Additionally, this user is the only one who can share accounts with the guest workspace.
Manager: It is an item-level role assigned by the Partnership Owner when sharing an account with the guest workspace. Managers can send requests to item Owners from the host workspace, asking them to share accounts with specific guest workspace members. However, Managers cannot manage other users (they are unable to remove, edit, or see the information of members) and cannot access account security settings.
Host workspace Admin: It is a user from the host workspace who has the Admin role and can perform user and workspace management tasks. The host workspace Admin must approve or decline any attempt to add a host-guest partnership.
Guest workspace Admin: It is a user from the guest workspace, on the partner’s side, who has the Admin role and can perform user and workspace management tasks. The guest workspace Admin must accept or decline any partnership request from the host workspace.
Any user in the host workspace can add a host-guest partnership. To establish the connection, you send a partnership request that must be approved by a host workspace Admin and accepted by a guest workspace Admin.
After adding the partnership, you can start sharing accounts with the guest workspace and assign one of the following roles over the items:
Collaborator: Guest workspace members can only log in to shared accounts, view secrets, and download secret attachments.
Manager: Guest workspace members can log in to shared accounts and request access to these accounts for other members.
For more information about roles, read the article How Cerby manages roles.
IMPORTANT: A host workspace can have multiple host-guest partnerships. However, they can only establish one connection with the same guest workspace.
Local partner
A local partnership enables you to invite external collaborators to your Cerby workspace as guest admins or guest users. By being in your workspace, any user can directly share access to the items they need for their work.
With this partnership, Cerby introduces the following roles:
Host Admin: It is a role assigned by the workspace Admin to a Cerby workspace member when adding the partnership. Host Admins can perform management tasks on the local partner and its guest users, and they overlook the activities the local partner’s users do in your workspace. Also, they can assign the Host Admin role to other workspace members.
Guest Admin: It is a role assigned by the workspace Admin to a guest user from your partner’s side when adding the partnership to Cerby. They can only manage other guest users and their access to your workspace.
NOTE: Guest admins can’t add other local partners, import items from LastPass, or see workspace members, policies, or settings.
Guest User: It is an external collaborator from your partner’s side who is invited to join your Cerby workspace with limited access to items and assets, enough to perform their activities.
Unlike a host-guest partnership, where you establish a connection with a guest workspace to grant shared access to your items via this connection, you can directly share access to your items and assets with a local partner and its guest users. This is because guest users are part of your workspace, using an identity and account provided and managed by Cerby.
By leveraging a local partner, you retain full control of your shared items, and you can perform user management tasks on the guest users, meaning that you can add or remove external collaborators from your workspace as needed.
Native partner
A native partner is a business or organization (agency, media planner, or consultant) already existing as a partner in your paid social apps for collaboration purposes in ad campaigns.
By connecting your partner to Cerby, you gain visibility on the users who access your assets from your partner's side. This level of visibility is not even achievable through the business manager of your paid social app, such as Meta Business Manager or TikTok for Business.
With this partnership, Cerby does not introduce any new role because it is a read-only capability. The user who connects a native partner is the App Owner in Cerby.
After establishing the partnership, you can sync and import the information of the partner’s users with shared access to your assets, providing you with a granular and centralized oversight of your business manager.
IMPORTANT: You can only add a native partner in Cerby if you have shared at least one asset with a partner in your paid social app or vice versa.
Unlike a local partner, where external collaborators exist in your workspace using an identity and account managed by Cerby, the user management capabilities remain in the paid social apps when you connect with a native partner. Therefore, your partners don’t have to use Cerby.
Currently, Cerby supports the Native Partner feature for the following paid social apps:
Meta Business Manager
TikTok For Business
Pinterest Business Manager