Streamline Your IT Operations With a Privileged Access Management (PAM) Solution

Streamline processes while improving security with the right PAM tools. Reduce risk by limiting access to admin accounts and applying the principle of least privilege.

PAM solutions enable IT teams to request and receive temporary privileged access for specific tasks that require it. This eliminates standing privileges that attackers could exploit and minimizes entrance points to critical systems.

Automated Reporting

When it comes to protecting your business from cyber threats, privileged access management is a critical component of your security architecture. PAM solutions enable you to enforce most minor privilege policies and monitor privileged accounts across the organization. An excellent privileged access management tool will also support multifactor authentication for admin identities and accounts, which is necessary to protect against credential theft and other attack vectors.

A PAM solution should be able to identify unauthorized actions and notify security teams when suspicious behavior is detected. It can also prevent data breaches by ensuring that only the right people have the right credentials to access systems and data. To spot hidden threats, your PAM solution should work with anomaly detection, enabling it to recognize outliers and identify suspicious activity based on location, time, or role.

As you implement automated reporting, one thing to remember is that not all employees will immediately be on the idea of being tracked this way. Running group workshops and providing adequate training is essential to help your employees become comfortable with automated reports. This will allow you to move towards a more proactive, data-driven culture.

Multifactor Authentication

Using multifactor authentication (MFA) to verify incoming identities is a powerful way to block bad actors in their tracks. Hackers can steal a username and password from a vulnerable user or buy them on the dark web, but gaining access to a second authentication factor is much more complicated—and requires more work from a bad actor. MFA is an essential component of a PAM solution, ensuring users are who they say they are to avoid data breaches and other attacks.

PAM solutions also help you implement best practices for privileged account management by monitoring and controlling access to systems, applications, devices, and databases. The best-privileged account management processes include a combination of software, defined process, and enforcement that helps you eliminate standing privileges—advisory accounts that are not vaulted and allow lateral movement if compromised—and limit the number of ways threat actors can enter your system. To do this, your PAM solution should help you use a time- and request-based approach for granting privileges to specific requirements and automatically revoke those privileges after the appropriate time.

Privileged Account Discovery and Onboarding

A PAM solution can help you monitor and observe privileged account use in your digital environment. This helps you comply with a least privilege policy, prove your compliance, and mitigate the risk of cybersecurity threats.

Cybercriminals rely on compromised privileged credentials to breach defenses and access organizational data. Once they gain access, they can perform malicious activities and impersonate employees to steal sensitive information or cause other damage.

The key to reducing the risk of these attacks is to limit privileged access to only what is necessary for users to get their jobs done. PAM solution features that can help reduce the attack surface, including granting just-in-time access to privileged accounts, severing access when an employee leaves, and more.

PAM tools also offer discovery and onboarding capabilities that reveal privileged accounts lacking effective control. These accounts can be held by old employees, contractors, or third-party vendors who haven’t been formally deactivated and may still have access to your digital environment. With regular discovery and onboarding, you can quickly identify privileged account holders and add necessary controls to prevent them from exploiting your organization.

Privileged Account Management

Privileged access management tools restrict system and data access to authorized users. They also help reduce workflow interruptions and ensure policy compliance, whether your organization is a three-person startup or an enterprise giant.

PAM solutions can automatically change default passwords on privileged accounts (like admin and root) that are often a favorite target for hackers, and they also help you implement least privilege strategies to minimize risk by granting people the minimum level of permissions required to perform their job functions. This helps stop malware from spreading, decreases attack surface, and improves user productivity.

For even more excellent protection, look for a PAM tool that uses ephemeral certificates to authenticate privileged sessions so that the credentials are not stored on the device or in the cloud. This reduces the threat of a breach and allows security teams to revoke credentials after a privileged session. This also makes it easier for IT to quickly detect suspicious activity after a cyberattack and limit its reach.

User Management

A PAM system contains a secure database to manage privileged accounts, secrets, and configuration, a service to establish, monitor, and record a privileged session on an underlying operating system (Windows, Unix) via a web browser, and a job engine to execute scripts or tasks. This eliminates several security vulnerabilities created by old approaches that store privileged credentials in spreadsheets, which require manual rotation and open doors for external attack or internal misuse.

A centralized PAM solution provides complete visibility into all privileged accounts and human users, enabling the implementation of best practices to limit entry points for threat actors. It also enables the integration of privileged access management with other enterprise IT management tools and business applications to streamline IT operations, reducing redundancies through contextual integration.

Implementing PAM is a must-have for any organization. However, implementing an effective privileged access management strategy is a continuous process that requires 24/7 surveillance to protect against today’s most severe threats effectively.