PAM solutions enable businesses to discover, onboard, automate, monitor, and protect privileged access. These tools help ensure that privileged accounts and credentials never fall into the wrong hands, protecting data from attacks. They also provide a clear audit trail to support compliance with regulatory standards and security policies.
Reduced Risk of Insider Threats
Hackers can use unmanaged privileged accounts and easily crawl into your IT network. Whether a rogue employee is stealing credentials or a departing worker leaves an unauthorized account behind, gaining access to critical files and applications can lead to severe consequences for your organization. A privileged access management solution eliminates these issues. They help you keep track of privileged access accounts so that every change or suspicious activity can be sensed and stopped. Moreover, it allows you to automatically revoke or adjust privileges when accounts are no longer needed. These cybersecurity tools also enable you to abide by strict government regulations on data protection, such as the GDPR and HIPAA. Almost all organizations need a centralized monitoring and control solution to comply with these stringent requirements. By automating password management best practices, ensuring that no one has more privilege than they need, and eliminating the need to remember complex passwords – PAM reduces the attack surface significantly. It also helps you detect and stop any breach attempts in progress and proactively stops credential theft. In addition, it helps you create and manage a comprehensive audit log of user activity. This helps you meet compliance requirements and ward off fines from authorities. Additionally, it provides automated alerts and reports that save your administrators time by consolidating privileged access management activities.
Reduced Risk of Malware Attacks
Most malware attacks leverage privileged accounts to gain access and exploit systems, networks, applications, and devices. A PAM solution can help eliminate the attack surface by ensuring that all privileged credentials are centralized and managed effectively. This reduces the risk of attackers gaining access to systems by stealing a user’s account password or exploiting a weak point in an application or device security design. PAM solutions can automatically detect and alert all privileged account activity and provide granular access control by enabling organizations to limit administrator privileges only to the specific tasks and applications users need to perform their jobs. This approach aligns with the principle of least privilege, which requires that users are given only the highest level of access necessary to perform their roles. The ability to monitor and log all privileged account activity also helps ensure that former employees do not return to the organization with access to sensitive information after leaving. This protects from insider threats and complies with industry standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and SOX. With continuous monitoring and automated deprovisioning, PAM solutions can help improve any business’s security posture without negatively impacting productivity. This makes them a valuable investment that delivers an outstanding ROI. By reducing the risk of breaches and minimizing costly attacks, a robust PAM system can significantly reduce the cost of protecting an enterprise’s critical IT assets.
Reduced Costs
You don’t have to look far in the news to see a report of data theft, security breaches, or ransomware attacks. It’s no wonder businesses seek new and innovative ways to improve their security posture without sacrificing productivity or efficiency. Privileged Access Management Solutions (PAM) offer a powerful alternative to password managers and authentication systems. PAM protects accounts with access to business-critical resources and provides visibility and control over those accounts.
These tools help companies implement the principle of least privilege by ensuring that users only get the credentials and permissions they need to do their jobs. This can prevent overprovisioning and reduce the risk of internal threats. In addition, PAM offers a variety of other capabilities, such as privileged activity logging that records user behavior and helps detect suspicious activities. This can help organizations quickly diagnose active breaches and provide documentation for regulatory compliance.
A PAM solution can also help reduce costs by eliminating the need to store and share passwords across applications, systems, and devices. This helps reduce help desk calls and password reset requests, which can be a significant cost for MSPs. Password-free high-assurance solutions also eliminate expensive hardware and reduce the need to support multiple authentication systems. This can significantly lower MSP costs and make it easier for customers to access their systems.
Increased Compliance
Privileged Access Management Solutions help organizations meet compliance standards by making tracking what privileged users do with their accounts more accessible. This includes reducing the risk of malware attacks and preventing breaches caused by former employees who have yet to have their accounts properly deprovisioned. The right PAM solution can centralize all privileged access and account information, reduce the number of accounts super admins use (e.g., IT managers and directors), and eliminate the need to share passwords among multiple tools and platforms. Integrating PAM with identity and access management (IAM) tools enables organizations to manage all privileged credentials under one umbrella and to automate a wide range of provisioning and de-provisioning policies, such as enforcing strong passwords, requiring multi-factor authentication, and monitoring session activities. Managing privileged access to networks, servers, applications, and devices is critical but often overlooked. Non-human accounts — including those used by IoT sensors, robot process automation, and commercial-off-the-shelf software — outnumber human accounts and are often harder to monitor, but can offer hackers a door into the enterprise. A comprehensive privileged access management strategy identifies the people, processes, and technology that require privileged access. It also enables enterprises to automate and control access to these resources by creating, amending, and revoking permissions and continuously monitoring privileged sessions. This enables organizations to detect and quickly respond to suspicious activity and maintain audit trails of all actions taken in a privileged session, which is required by many compliance standards, including HIPAA, SOX, and PCI DSS.
