Are you in the process of evaluating privileged access management solutions? Read on to learn what you should focus on to choose the right PAM solution to protect your organization’s data.
What are PAM solutions used for?
Privileged account management software solutions help organizations control, secure, monitor and audit privileged accounts and their activities across the IT environment. They cover both human users like admins and non-human accounts like service accounts.
Privileged accounts require special attention because they are vulnerable to attacks and misuse. When a company has hundreds of accounts with privileged access, it’s impossible to manage them manually. Trying to track them using spreadsheets or text documents increases the chances of errors and unnoticed vulnerabilities, while burdening IT teams who are often already stretched to the limit.
In addition, many compliance standards require organizations to maintain control over privileged access, including regulations governing the financial and healthcare industries. To avoid costly audit findings, these organizations need to secure privileged access to sensitive data and workloads.
Why do companies need PAM solutions?
Privileged access management tools are an essential part of a broader cybersecurity program. They help organizations:
- Discover all accounts that have administrative privileges for on-premises and cloud-based workloads, including both accounts used by individuals and privileged nonhuman “machine to machine” credentials
- Minimize the risks associated from improper administrative access
- Achieve and prove compliance with industry and regulatory requirements
How do PAM solutions work?
Traditional privileged access management solutions typically work like this:
- A user who needs to perform a task that requires elevated permissions requests access to a privileged account, explaining why they need privileged access.
- The PAM solution auto-approves the request according to policy or optionally routes it to the appropriate manager for manual approval.
- When approval is granted, the PAM solution logs the decision and provides the user with the temporary privileged access required to complete the specified task. Typically, they receive access via the PAM instead of learning the password for the privileged account.
What are the drawbacks to traditional PAM solutions?
Many older privileged account management solutions use a password vault to store the privileged credentials. However, as cybersecurity and compliance needs evolved, so did PAM solutions. The next generation of solutions added more features on top of the password vault to provide capabilities like session management and least privilege. This increased complexity made implementation and ongoing maintenance more complicated and costlier. Indeed, PAM solutions now require separate virtual machines or even separate hardware.
More important, each account under management still retains its privileges 24/7. These powerful standing privileges leave organizations with a large attack surface that can be exploited by attackers.
How do modern PAM solutions work?
To overcome the complexity, cost and security issues inherent in traditional PAM solutions, vendors started offering a modern approach: privilege on demand, also known as zero standing privilege.
With this approach, administrators are granted just enough privilege to complete a specific task, and only for the time needed to complete that task. When the job is done, the privileges are either removed from the account or the account is removed entirely. This approach dramatically reduces the risk of powerful accounts being exploited by internal or outside threats. And when implemented properly, it does not hurt business efficiency.
What you should focus on when evaluating PAM solutions?
To choose the right PAM solution for your organization, be sure to look closely at each tool’s implementation options, integration capabilities and feature set:
Implementation options
Most PAM tools are available as an on-premises appliance or virtual appliance, but a growing number of vendors offer SaaS-delivered PAM. Be sure to assess the speed of implementation and ease of use, and also review whether the product can s?ale to meet your business and IT network requirements.
Integration capabilities
Check whether the PAM solution can be integrated with your other critical security solutions, such as identity access management (IAM), security information and event management (SIEM), change management and single sign-on authentication systems. In particular, look for a flexible architecture and an open database schema.
Features
Be sure to assess whether a particular solution offers the following capabilities:
- Privileged account discovery and onboarding — The tool should help you locate privileged accounts in your IT ecosystem and bring them under PAM control.
- Just-in-time (JIT) privileged access — To reduce the risk of standing privileges being exploited by malicious insiders or outside attackers, look for a tool that grants privileged access only when needed and only for the time necessary to complete a business task.
- Privileged session management and activity tracking — Being able to monitor and record how privileged credentials are being used helps you spot improper behavior, immediately block access to sensitive information and resources. and hold individuals accountable for their actions.
- Reporting and analysis — In addition, evaluate how well the PAM solution enables you to analyze and report on how privileged accounts are used. In particular, consider whether it will help you find insights for improving your security posture and prove compliance with regulatory mandates.
- Privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM) — Check whether the solution makes it easy to grant and remove rights from privileged accounts as needed in Windows or Unix/Linux systems.
- Privileged credential management and access governance? — A central hub can be an ideal way to review privileged accounts and permissions and formally manage privilege assignment.
- Secret management — Assess the methods and tools the PAM solution provides for managing privileged user and service credentials, such as APIs and tokens.
- Multifactor authentication (MFA) — Make sure privileged users are required to confirm their identity in more than one way before accessing company systems and applications.
- Automation — Consider whether the solution provides automated workflows for handling repetitive PAM tasks.
What are the top PAM solutions to consider?
Trying to compare all the PAM products that are available can feel overwhelming. Here are some solutions to consider during your selection process:
- Netwrix PAM solutions— Avoid the risk and overhead of traditional vault-centric tools with a third-generation PAM solution that is cost effective, intuitive and easy to deploy. The Netwrix PAM Solution enables you to closely control the use of privileged access to protect your sensitive data and critical systems and comply with industry and government regulations. You can replace your risky standing privileged accounts with ephemeral accounts that provide just enough access for the task at hand — without hurting administrator productivity. Plus, the solution maintains a detailed audit trail of all privileged account activity and alerts you immediately about suspicious behavior so you can respond promptly.
- Delinea (formerly Centrify) Server PAM— This cloud-based PAM service focused on privileged account and session management (PASM). It enables least-privilege access for human and machine identities based on verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request and the risk of the access environment. It centralizes fragmented identities and improves audit and compliance visibility.
- CyberArk PAM solutions— One of the best-known PAM vendors, CyberArk offers a full lifecycle approach for managing privileged accounts and SSH keys. The solutions help you secure, provision, manage, control and monitor activities associated with all types of privileged identities, including root accounts on UNIX servers and embedded passwords in applications and scripts.
- Thycotic Secret Server— This full-featured PAM tool is available both on premises and in the cloud. It can automatically discover and help you manage your privileged accounts to protect against malicious activity enterprise-wide. It includes application access control, single sign-on, password management and least-privilege credential management.
- BeyondTrust PAM solutions — This solutions offer a broad set of PAM capabilities, including endpoint privilege management, secure remote access, privileged password management, PASM, and privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM). It also offers integration with adjacent technologies.
Conclusion
Effective privileged account management is a must-have for every organization. Although implementing a PAM tool used to be expensive and time-consuming, modern solutions offer fast deployment and automated operations. Moreover, third-generation PAM solutions can slash security risks and ensure regulatory compliance by offering zero standing privilege.
FAQ
1. What is a privileged access management (PAM) solution?
PAM solutions help organizations control and manage privileged access to systems, data and other resources in an IT environment.
2. How do you implement privileged access management?
Start by identifying your privileged access needs, including how privileged accounts need to interact with your data, systems and other IT resources. Assess the threat that those accounts pose and your organization’s risk tolerance. Then evaluate candidate PAM solutions based on their implementation options, integration capabilities and feature set. Finally, develop policies and processes that enable your PAM tool to fit smoothly into your organization’s work culture and business and IT practices.
3. How do you manage privileged accounts?
Privileged account management incudes discovering privileged accounts; limiting IT admin access to systems based on the least-privilege principle; and monitoring and recording privileged account activity to spot improper behavior and hold individuals accountable for their actions.
4. Why does a company need privileged access management software?
When a company has hundreds of accounts with privileged access, it’s impossible to effectively manage them using manual methods like spreadsheets. PAM solutions streamline and automate the process of granting and revoking privileged access, reducing IT workload while dramatically improving accuracy and reliability. In addition to enhancing security, PAM solutions also help you meet compliance requirements and pass audits.
