Why Privileged Account Discovery Is Essential for Growing IT Environments?
As organizations grow, they keep adding IT assets,cloud services, and applications. This adds substantial privileged accounts to the network. The administrative accounts, rightly termed as the ‘keys to the IT kingdom’ provide unlimited access. Managing them, controlling their access, and monitoring their usage becomes crucial from a security perspective. When such privileged accounts keep proliferating, managing them proves to be a laborious task.
IT administrators require complete visibility and control over the accounts organization-wide to manage them effectively. Consolidating all the accounts in a secure, central repository is fundamental to gaining visibility and control.
The easiest way to consolidate all your accounts to the central repository is to do an automated discovery. Securden comes with a powerful discovery engine that discovers the privileged accounts in computers, databases,cloud services, and devices, building a comprehensive an inventory for efficient management.
How Can You Automatically Discover and Bring Privileged Accounts Under Centralized Management?
Securden discovers the IT assets and the privileged accounts present in the network. The discovery process brings everything under effective management, including long-forgotten privileged accounts, unmanaged devices, privileged accounts belonging to users who left the organization, accounts you forgot to disable after off-boarding a contractor, and so on. Securden discovers various types of devices, IT assets, and the privileged accounts present in your network. Discovery can detect accounts like:
1.Server Accounts:
- Windows accounts (local, domain, and service accounts)
- Linux devices and their accounts
- Mac devices and the accounts, devices and the accounts thereof
2.Database Accounts:
- Accounts associated with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL databases.
3.Network Devices:
- Accounts associated with various network devices such as switches, routers, firewalls, other network devices from various vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, HP, etc.
4.DevOps Account Secrets:
- Automate secrets management associated with tools majorly used by developers & engineers such as Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Git accounts etc.
5.Other Accounts:
- Active Directory and LDAP-compliant directory services account
- Privileged accounts used in web services such as ASP.NET config files and SharePoint; and in middleware tiers such as Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and SAP NetWeave
- Cloud identities on platforms including Google Cloud, Microsoft Office 365, Azure Active Directory, Amazon AWS, IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, and Force.com
How Does Continuous Discovery Enable High Automation in Privileged Account Management?
You can achieve high automation by continuously discovering the new IT assets and the privileged accounts in your network. Every time new IT assets and privileged accounts are added or a new database is commissioned to your network, continuous discovery enables you to keep your network infrastructure up to date and manage them proactively. Reports ensure that you have full visibility over these newly discovered accounts.
How Can You Automatically Randomize Discovered Passwords and Ensure a Secure Start?
You have the option to assign strong, unique passwords randomly to all your accounts after discovery. This ensures that you start off with a clean slate for privileged account management. It also invalidates the other copies, such as passwords stored in spreadsheets and text files, and prevents any possible unauthorized access. In addition, Securden becomes the central credential repository and it will force all users to rely on it for all privileged access. Using Privileged Accounts Discovery, you can supervise privileged accounts smoothly, keep your account inventory current, and prevent any misuse of privileged accounts.
FAQs
For CISOs, IT security leads, and risk officers, privileged account discovery involves scanning your infrastructure to uncover accounts with elevated access—like domain admins, service accounts, and local admin credentials. It’s essential because these accounts, if left unmanaged, create high-risk attack vectors for lateral movement and privilege escalation in cyberattacks. Discovery minimizes this risk and improves compliance.
IT administrators, system engineers, and security operations (SecOps) teams are usually in charge of running these scans. In highly regulated industries, compliance managers or internal audit teams may also mandate periodic reviews. Centralized tools empower these personas with unified visibility and streamlined account management.
For IT operations and security teams, an automated discovery engine scans endpoints, servers, cloud apps, and databases using secure protocols like WMI, SSH, and APIs. It identifies privileged accounts, classifies them, and enables direct onboarding into secure vaults—eliminating manual tracking and reducing operational overhead.
Privileged account discovery tools used by IT administrators and DevOps teams can uncover:
- Domain admin accounts
- Local administrator accounts on machines
- Service and scheduled task accounts
- Application credentials hardcoded in scripts
- Orphaned/shared admin accounts
- Privileged cloud identities from Azure, AWS, etc.
Yes. Security admins and IT governance teams can schedule automated discovery scans at daily, weekly, or monthly intervals. This ensures any newly created privileged account is detected early and brought under centralized governance, reducing exposure time.
IT and security managers should take the following steps post-discovery:
- Rotate credentials to prevent unauthorized access
- Assign ownership or department tags
- Import them into a password manager or access governance workflow
- Enable continuous auditing to track usage and anomalies
This streamlines control and ensures accountability.
For compliance officers and risk auditors, privileged account discovery offers visibility into who holds elevated access. Frameworks like NIST, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA mandate such visibility. Maintaining a live inventory enables audit-readiness and reduces regulatory risk.
Yes. Cloud architects and hybrid infrastructure managers can use discovery tools with API integrations to detect privileged accounts across on-prem servers, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and SaaS apps—ensuring consistent control across environments.
For CISOs and risk management teams, failing to run periodic discovery results in:
- Orphaned accounts with unchecked access
- Untracked admin credentials exploited by threat actors
- Gaps in visibility that lead to audit failures and regulatory penalties
- Greater vulnerability to ransomware and insider threats
It’s a foundational activity for reducing privilege-related risk.
Yes. For IT admins managing enterprise password vaults, many discovery tools support auto-onboarding. Once accounts are found, they can be directly imported into a password manager like Securden Password Vault for Enterprises, randomized, and governed via access policies—accelerating your zero-trust posture.
