It only takes a quick look at the news to see that cyber-attacks continue to hit organizations large and small. These threats cause data breaches that can lead to productivity loss, legal costs, and damage to brand image.
Privileged Access Management solutions can close these cybersecurity gaps and help protect critical systems and sensitive information. These solutions include discovering and vaulting accounts, enforcing password policies, providing remote access control, privilege elevation, and session management.
Security
PAM solutions help organizations manage privileged access and prevent threats from exploiting these accounts. These security features include fine-grained authentication, automation and authorization, session recording, and robust auditing. A PAM solution also offers visibility into privileged accounts, server, and device access to make monitoring activity and identifying suspicious behavior easier.
Cybercriminals highly prize privileged accounts because they open doors into the most sensitive parts of a network, allowing them to steal finances, disrupt workflows, and even shut down entire systems. A PAM solution helps secure these accounts and prevent a cyberattack by enforcing the Principle of Least Privilege, ensuring that users only have access to the data and resources they need for their jobs.
The solution also helps prevent a type of insider threat called “privileged access creep,” where an employee can gain unauthorized privileges over time by not being monitored or when accounts aren’t adequately de-provisioned when employees leave the company. A good PAM solution will automatically rotate passwords, update credentials, and remove unused accounts from the environment to reduce risk.
The best PAM solutions also enable companies to meet compliance and regulatory frameworks better by giving them a single, centralized way to manage privileged access. This can help reduce the risk of network incidents, failed audits, and non-compliance fines. A good PAM solution will support several industry and government frameworks, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, FDDC, SOX Government Connect, FISMA, and more.
Compliance
Privileged access management solutions can help organizations comply with many frameworks and regulations, including PCI DSS, FDDC, SOX, etc. This is because privileged access management ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive data and systems and that unauthorized activity is detected and stopped.
For example, when a third-party contractor or vendor needs to access a system or application, a PAM solution can enable them to use a secure remote desktop. This allows the administrator to monitor their session, ensuring that all activities are within policy and that no malware is being downloaded to the system.
Another feature is a password vault, which helps reduce risk by storing all your passwords and credentials in one place that is only accessible to authorized users. The vault can also store compliance records, screen recordings, and keystroke data to provide a complete audit trail.
Another feature is the ability to limit access to privileged accounts based on time. This will help prevent insider threats from stealing information or installing malware on critical systems that could cause the business to shut down. This can be done by setting up time windows to access specific systems like accounting or backup systems. It can also identify anomalous activity that may indicate malicious intent.
Cost
A good PAM solution discovers privileged accounts across the environment and enables administrators to import them into a secure, encrypted repository known as a password vault. PAM solutions can then manage those credentials using automated control features, such as hiding passwords from specific users, automatic rotation, and session recording. They also enable privileged elevation and delegation management, which reduces the risk of compromised admin credentials.
These controls are ideal to safeguard against insider threats enforcing the principle of least privilege by linking access to job roles. Additionally, they help prevent users from sharing passwords or escalating permissions to run unauthorized applications. And, by severing access once an employee leaves the business, they reduce the threat of orphaned accounts that can be exploited for future attacks.
In addition to reducing the cost of security and improving compliance, PAM solutions can improve business agility by ensuring that employees have only the access they need to do their jobs. This helps to avoid potential regulatory issues and data breaches, which can be very costly for businesses today and in the future. PAM solutions can also provide organizations with a level of confidence in the event of a data breach that they can prove that their privileged access management policies were in place and were followed, reducing any fines or penalties that could be levied against them by regulators.
Time to Value
Privileged access management solutions enable you to control secret and root accounts, preventing internal breaches. They can also help you combat insider threats by ensuring users have only the minimum privilege required to perform their job functions. Lastly, linking access to job roles and implementing user accountability via keystroke logging can help you meet compliance requirements and improve overall security hygiene.
With comprehensive privileged access management, you can reduce IT system administrator labor costs by automating password discovery and policy enforcement. This frees up IT teams to work on innovative projects that will accelerate business growth.
A privileged access management solution will also vault and rotate passwords for secret accounts and other sensitive credentials. This protects these accounts from hackers who target static and unchanging passwords. The right privileged access management solution will also record a history of past logins to aid in recovering from an incident.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a comprehensive PAM solution will help you save on the costs of responding to security incidents by making it easier for technical teams to gather evidence and complete audits. For example, it can reduce the time to recover from a breach by allowing you to restore systems with detailed logs and session recordings quickly. It can also cut the number of engineering hours spent gathering information during an audit by providing all the details you need to prove your security compliance.
