PAM – The next frontier in security services

Data breaches are starting to become quite common and organizations are taking different solution to prevent security thefts. Many Privileged users or super users who have access to all the critical information in an organization are prone to be target of many data breaches as they have elevated permission and access to many confidential data in the organization. According to Gartner 65% of enterprises allow for the unrestricted, unmonitored, and shared use of privileged accounts. This stat tells us how easily an enterprise can fall prey to data theft when a privileged user account is left unmonitored.  The growing importance of PAM is burgeoned with increasing threat scape.  Today’s IT environment is not limited to the systems and resources within the network .but has is extended to the cloud-based environment.  Gartner predicted PAM to be second fasted growing segment for information security and risk management spending worldwide for 2019.

Privileged access management (PAM), is a solution to manage all the privileged user’s critical assets and safeguard them from the data/identity theft.  Instead of directly accessing the services or database, the privileged user accounts go into a vault, wherein this vault is monitored by a security team and logs their activity. A user is offered privileges in full or partial or on when a need arises.

Selecting a good vendor

To select a good vendor metrics like pricing, ability to provide multi factor integration and scalability, must be looked into.  Session recording will be an important feature that must be considered as this will provide visibility of operations

The working of PAM

• Evaluates all privileged accounts from user and application ends
• Provides procedures to get privileged access including MFA
• Availability of passwords on demand to applications
• Ability to change passwords automatically / periodically /when user leaves the company
• Enforcing least privilege policies on endpoints
• Monitor and record privilege sessions for audit purposes