“Forrester estimates that 80% of data breaches have a connection to compromised privileged credentials, such as passwords, tokens, keys, and certificates.”
In every organization, users across departments rely on usernames and passwords to access devices. The security of each of these accounts is extremely important, but protecting privileged accounts is even more crucial. Privileged accounts have administrative level access, allowing users to make configuration changes to devices.
The need for Privileged Access Management (PAM), comes from the difficulty of managing different accounts and passwords across an organization securely.
Why is Privileged Access Management Important?
Privileged Access Management is among top 10 projects recommended by Gartner for security leaders to implement or improve upon.
Why? Because every organization has key employees accessing critical business applications. The credentials to these applications must be strictly protected. Often, the sensitive information related to business is stored within these applications and unauthorized access could pose a serious threat to the business. Privileged accounts are always under the scanner for cyber-attacks as they hold valuable information and important credentials.
Therefore, anyone who has access to the application, software or a tool carrying information that is extremely important to the company, should come under the umbrella of ‘Privileged Access’.
Below listed are the key reasons why CISOs are prioritizing privileged access management now:
- Quick detection of cyber risks
The security provided to privileged accounts is quite strict. Any suspicious activity is detected and responded to immediately. Which is why the incidences of data breaches and cyberattacks on privileged accounts are relatively less.
- Ensuring password protection
Passwords are extremely important. Despite years of IT teams doing their best to push best password practices, users choose unsecure passwords more often than desirable, and reuse passwords across the organization. This enables cyber-attackers to easily predict the password and gain unauthorized access to critical systems. With PAM, there will be more focused measures to make sure password policies and best practices are followed, to ensure that those crucial privileged accounts are protected.
- Constant updates to cater to security trends
Every organization is gearing up and preparing for digital transformation. But how many can face the emerging cybersecurity challenges? This is where most organizations are stuck today by not updating their systems to the changing threat-scape. Thus, opting for Privileged Access Management means you have taken the right step in inculcating top-notch security within your organization. PAM has drastically changed the way enterprises protect access to critical systems. Using credential vaults and other session control tools, PAM has allowed managers to maintain privileged identities while significantly decreasing the risk. By centralizing privileged credentials in one place, PAM systems can ensure a high level of security, control on who is accessing, log all accesses and monitor any suspicious activity.
- Insights and Alerts about usage
A well-designed Privileged Access Management solution keeps a track of who is accessing the accounts, the number of times password was changed or updated, how many times the accounts are being accessed, and so on. A detailed report is generated and that gives the organization a clear insight into the usage and security of the privileged account. These systems can also raise an alert or warning when a pre-defined condition with regards to access of critical systems is breached or an anomalous event occurs. This enables organizations to be proactive in terms of managing access related threat and incidents.
—————————————————————————————————————-
Also Read: A Comprehensive Cybersecurity Policy: Need of the hour
—————————————————————————————————————–
- Disaster recovery
PAM systems are designed with failover safeguards to ensure that no single point of failure can prevent critical access to systems, either during an extensive system loss or network failure. If an all-out emergency occurs, a user could put a flag on the system to indicate that no approval is required for any checkout. All such requests would have to be approved automatically but still audited, and the user can pre-define who can request such access, who is responsible for approving it, and on which systems.
Privileged access management is a crucial part of network security and should be implemented for all users that are granted advanced permissions. Organizations need such solutions to ensure comprehensive protection of critical data and systems.
Organization must now take a holistic approach to information security and be geared up to implement the best practices and be well-informed of the emerging cybersecurity challenges.
