The purpose of this article is to talk about the driving need for privileged access management and why you should get PAM.
PAM Protects Privileged Accounts
According to the NBC article, “Your Identity is for Sale on the Dark Web for Less Than $1,200” by Alyssa Newcomb, username and password credentials are being sold on the dark web anywhere from $6 to $1,200, depending on its perceived value. Cyber security is top of mind not only for IT and IT security executives, but also business leaders. This is due to the overwhelming amount of cyber breaches that have plagued people, companies, and government entities over the past few years and have been splashed across news headlines. Traditional perimeter defense tools such as a firewall and antivirus software are no longer sufficient to protect an organization’s digital assets. A multi-layered approach, or defense in depth strategy, is becoming the new normal security posture for the modern organization.
A key component of the modern security posture is protecting privileged access to high value assets such as domain administrator accounts, network devices, service accounts, application and database accounts, accounts used for contractors and vendors, and local administrator accounts. These accounts are high value targets for cyber criminals as they are able to access the most valuable information of an organization. Maintaining these accounts can prove difficult given their nature and the amount of accounts that need to be managed.
PAM Discovers and Inventories Privileged Accounts
The challenges presented from managing privileged access include discovery and identification of accounts that have privileged access, rotating passwords of privileged accounts (rotating them without breaking applications and services), provisioning and de-provisioning accounts from a centralized platform, ensuring compliance of password complexity policy across all account types, and storing credentials in an unsecured data repository like Microsoft Excel. Furthermore, systems administrators, junior administrators, and application owners typically know the passwords for accessing key applications and data. This presents a security risk, which PAM solutions can overcome by providing secured access to these resources without a systems administrator or application owner ever needing to know the password.
Privileged Access Management Provides a Process
PAM security solutions can help remediate the challenges presented from managing privileged access because they can streamline and automate the discovery, security, and protection of privileged accounts. PAM security tools mitigate the risk of sharing credentials with third parties by offering a portal for access, set time limits on how long credentials may be used and automatically expire them. PAM solutions can also monitor and record sessions of privileged accounts to help enforce proper behavior and can be instrumental when discovering the cause and activity of a breach. They also provide a formal process for account provisioning and de-provisioning, rotating of passwords, and ensure password complexity rules across multiple types of accounts (i.e. databases, applications, and service accounts).
PAM solutions are one part of the IAM (identity access management) security solution stack, but represent an important part in helping organizations maintain secure access to privileged accounts that represent the greatest ability to access the most highly sensitive information that an organization stores. By focusing efforts on remediating security gaps presented by the lack of supervision and control over privileged accounts, IT leaders can not only enhance their security posture but also increase productivity through many of the automated features that are provided within PAM solutions.