Privileged Access Management (PAM)

What are privileged accounts?

Privileged accounts refer to the powerful accounts that grant special access, typically administrative access to systems and applications. These accounts can be associated with human users and non-human entities such as application and machine identities.

In an enterprise IT environment, these accounts exist in the form of administrator accounts, superuser accounts, root accounts, local administrator accounts, domain administrator accounts, secure socket shell keys (SSH keys), service and application accounts. These are also called ‘secrets’ from a DevOps context.

What is Privileged Access Management (PAM)?

Riding on the administrative powers of these accounts, a host of activities such as installing or removing software, configuring critical system settings, modifying or deleting data can be performed, which otherwise cannot be done as a normal or standard user. Because of the very nature of the activities that can be performed, proactive management of these accounts becomes critical from a security perspective to prevent unauthorized activities and safeguard the applications, infrastructure, and confidential data.

Key challenges in privileged access management

Organizations face several challenges when it comes to securing privileged accounts. Attackers exploit these loopholes to gain a foothold on machines, move laterally in the network and escalate privileges to attain their targets. Most of the security issues arise due to the way we handle privileged accounts.

• Lack of visibility – Protection often starts with visibility. Lack of visibility over the total number of accounts, where they sit in an organization's IT landscape could spell a disaster. To protect, privileged accounts must be discovered and consolidated continuously.
• Manual approaches to credentials management – The essential requirement in ensuring security is assigning strong, unique passwords that are periodically randomized. Manual procedures to achieve this are prone to errors, time-consuming and cumbersome.
• Inadequate access controls – Ensuring the right access to the right person at the right time for the right duration is the fundamental aspect of access control. This aspect is often overlooked in organizations. Users often get access to accounts that are not related to their job profiles. When users leave the organization, deprovisioning becomes a nightmare.
• Lack of centralized monitoring and control – Organization-wide visibility and control over privileged access are essential from a security perspective. Without the right tools in place, IT divisions struggle to gain centralized control of privileged accounts.
• Audit and compliance issues - Organizations worldwide face heavy financial and reputational damage for unmet regulatory requirements. Tracking and recording every privileged activity is a must and a key challenge to many organizations today.

How does Securden PAM help in managing privileged access?

Securden Unified PAM is a full-featured privileged access security solution that combines Password Vaulting, Privileged Account Management, Remote Access / Remote Session Management, Application Password Management, Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management, and Endpoint Privilege Management in a single package.

It helps IT teams to securely store, protect, and automate the management of all high privileged account passwords, keys, and identities. It enables IT administrators to centrally control, audit, monitor, and record all access to critical IT assets, thereby reducing risks related to privileged access.

Securden can be deployed in minutes on a server on-prem or hosted on private cloud instances.

Gain complete control over privileged access, minimize security risks

• Protect and manage privileged accounts, mitigate security risks

  Centrally store, manage, and control access to all privileged accounts, including passwords, keys, certificates, and documents. Prevent identity thefts and unauthorized access to credentials. Minimize attack surface and reduce security risks.

• Control access, monitor activities, bring in order. Improve operational efficiency

  In the absence of centralized management, privileged accounts are left uncontrolled and unmonitored resulting in chaos. Consolidate accounts, establish access controls, enforce policies, eliminate system lockouts, and improve IT teams’ efficiency.

• Enforce policies, demonstrate compliance, safeguard reputation

  Industry and government regulations (such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, NERC-SIP, and others) mandate controlling and continuously monitoring privileged access. Ensure and demonstrate compliance to various regulations by enforcing policy-based controls, audit trails, and reports.