Inside IT Security & Privileged Users Management

Contrary to popular belief, cyberattacks are not (always) a massive attempt to take over or disable your infrastructure. While a wide DDOS attack can be used as a decoy, the real work is more subtle, more elaborate. Consider a James Bond film, for example. The bad guy would try to infiltrate your organization quietly, identify its weaknesses, and attempt to gain power gradually in order to fulfill his villainous plan.

Just as in those Bond movies, broad, external defenses are not enough, and usually countermeasures come too late to stop the infiltration. This is especially true for fragmented organizations and enterprises relying heavily on external contractors and employees working remotely. Once an enemy has found his way in, the whole organization falls. With 69% of breaches perpetrated by outsiders like organized criminal groups and nation-states, it takes a special problem-solver like 007 to save the day.

Business has always run on personal connections. But for many years, it’s also been run on a host of network and data connections designed to provide both internal and external users with the access to corporate systems and information that they need and want. On a daily basis, millions of workers use that access to do their jobs – and they take that access for granted, in large part because of the relative ease in accomplishing it. But there’s a facet to this access that should always be kept in mind, both by users of networks and the administrators charged with protecting those same networks and data: Access is a privilege, and not a right.

Privileged access management, or PAM, is software that helps organizations maintain complete control and visibility over their most critical systems and data. A robust PAM solution ensures that all user actions, including those taken by privileged users, are monitored and can be audited in case of a security breach.

An organization’s security posture benefits from the ability to manage and track access to privileged accounts. Privileged users—as well as those impersonating them—can present major security threats. A Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution offers an answer. It enables security teams to stay on top of privileged account access. To work, however, it must be a scalable PAM solution. The PAM solution must scale flexibly in a growing organization or suffer being disused, to the detriment of security overall. What does it take to build a scalable PAM solution? This article explores the answer to that question.

When talking about Privileged Access Management, it’s important to focus on the real objective: to ensure that only the right person can access the right system at any given time. A password vault can easily handle that, but you really need more. It’s far more important to ensure that when someone accesses a target, this person does only what they are supposed to do, and nothing more.