Windows account management deals with administration of who has access to what resources along with what type of access they have or should have.
In a typical Windows environment of an organization, other than the standard accounts, there are numerous highly privileged admin accounts such as local, domain and service accounts that exist.
These privileged accounts are vital to running your business processes but at the same time, carries risk of abuse because of the high privileges they carry.
Therefore there is a need for proper monitoring, controlling and reporting of these accounts to prevent both internal and external bad actors from exploiting these accounts and subsequently landing your organization in trouble in breach of security and compliance.
There are traditional products like Microsoft LAPS available to mitigate the challenges related to password security but they offer only basic use cases such as password rotation for local admin accounts only.
So in order to protect all types of privileged accounts in your estate and to stay in compliance with regulatory bodies, you need products such as PAM which offers not just password management solutions but an end to end privileged access management solution.
Poor Password management practices such as weak passwords, passwords not rotated frequently invite cyberattacks. Unfortunately this is the case with most organizations. To add to it, when windows are deployed in multiple machines using a windows base image, then all the machines will be configured with the same local admin password.
Effectively, one local admin password to unlock all the machines.
Hackers usually exploit such loopholes to escalate privileges and move laterally across your network. Therefore password best practices must be adhered to and in addition, all the local admin accounts must be monitored and audited for all activities.
Unlike local admin accounts, domain admin accounts are stored in the active directory domain controller.
These accounts have far reaching access levels. Using domain accounts, one can change global policies impacting several computers and users connected to the active directory.
Hackers gaining access to domain accounts can wreak havoc as these accounts carry high privileges. Therefore it is all the more critical to implement password best practices and also to continuously monitor and audit the activities of these accounts.
Service accounts are a special type of non-human privileged account used to execute applications and run automated services, virtual machine instances, and other processes.
In today's IT environment, many tasks are automated to run without human intervention. Scheduled jobs, accessing an API typically run on service accounts.
Usually a single service account will be referenced in multiple places across applications and processes, therefore when the service account credential changes, the change needs to be propagated to all the places where it is referenced (i.e. dependencies).
Manually managing this propagation is error prone, cumbersome and likely to cause disruption to business. Like domain accounts, they are also highly privileged hence they are always under the radar of cybercriminals. Therefore, tight monitoring and logging of all account activities are mandatory to take control of these accounts from exploitation.
Securden Unified PAM automatically discovers all the windows accounts and their dependencies and brings them under a central umbrella for management.
This process also locates accounts that are inactive, long-lost privileged accounts, and accounts of those who had left the organization as well.
The accounts discovery can be scheduled on a regular basis so that any new accounts that come into light are automatically brought under centralized management. This effectively eliminates the risk of hackers entering into your network through unmanaged or old accounts.
Securden allows you to effectively manage passwords for all types of Windows accounts. It enforces strong, unique passwords and rotates them frequently. It stores all the passwords in a centralized vault so that the users don't have to remember all their passwords but can retrieve them when required.
With Securden, you can define password policies in line with your organization requirements. By enforcing industry best password practices in an automated manner, Securden reduces the risk of cybersecurity incidents.
Today, organizations have to comply with multiple regulations. Non compliance leads to financial and reputational loss. Governing bodies expect organizations to demonstrate that they are taking measures to protect credentials and regulate access. Securden PAM empowers the organization with capabilities to secure credentials and access.
With advanced monitoring, controlling, recording and reporting features, you can be rest assured that you are staying on top of every privileged activity across your enterprise ensuring security and meeting regulatory compliance.
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