Do You Have Your Most Privileged Users Under Control?
Learn about the importance of Privileged Access Management (PAM) in governing your most sensitive IT accesses and securing your organisation’s data.
Do You Have Your Most Privileged Users Under Control?
Privileged access management (PAM) is a critical element of cybersecurity that focuses on securing the accounts and users with elevated access to critical systems and sensitive data within an organisation. These privileged accounts and users represent a significant risk to an organisation’s security. They often have the power to perform actions that could cause irreparable damage if they fall into the wrong hands.
Ensuring these accounts are appropriately governed is essential to minimise the risks of privileged users. This means establishing controls and processes to manage access, monitor activity, and detect potential threats. However, achieving full governance of privileged accounts can only be challenging with the right tools and processes in place.
Fortunately, Identity Governance and PAM can provide a comprehensive solution to help organisations manage and secure their most privileged users. The integration of these two technologies allows for the automation of the entire access lifecycle, including provisioning, de-provisioning, and access reviews, ensuring that privileged accounts are appropriately managed and monitored.
Zero standing privileges are a critical component of a PAM solution. This approach involves limiting access privileges to the minimum necessary level required to perform a specific task, granting access only when needed and revoking it as soon as it’s no longer necessary. By adopting this approach, organisations can significantly reduce their attack surface and mitigate the risks associated with privileged accounts.
This blog post will examine the importance of privileged access management, the benefits of integrating Identity Governance and PAM, and how zero-standing privileges can help increase security posture.
What Is Privileged Access Management (PAM)?
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a critical cybersecurity discipline that protects high-level access to sensitive data, applications, and systems. PAM is designed to manage and monitor the use of privileged accounts, which are typically reserved for IT administrators, system operators, and other trusted insiders. These accounts have elevated privileges that allow users to perform tasks that regular users can’t, such as installing software, accessing system settings, or changing configurations. As such, they present a significant security risk if they fall into the wrong hands or are misused.
PAM aims to provide granular control over privileged access, ensuring that only authorised users can access sensitive systems or data and that their actions are monitored and audited. PAM solutions typically include privileged account discovery, credential management, access control, session monitoring, and analytics. By implementing PAM, organisations can reduce the risk of data breaches, insider threats, and other cybersecurity incidents resulting from unauthorised or malicious use of privileged accounts.
In addition to managing privileged accounts, PAM can enforce zero-standing privileges (ZSP). This security model requires users to request and obtain access to privileged accounts per session. This means that users have no persistent access to privileged accounts, and their access is automatically revoked after the session ends. ZSP minimises the risk of unauthorised access, reduces the attack surface, and improves overall security posture.
Overall, PAM is critical to any organisation’s cybersecurity strategy, especially in today’s threat landscape, where cybercriminals constantly seek ways to exploit privileged accounts to gain access to sensitive data and systems. By implementing a PAM solution, organisations can protect their most sensitive data and assets against unauthorised access and misuse.
Why Privileged Accounts And Privileged Users Must Be Governed Properly
Controlling privileged access has become more critical in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape. Privileged accounts and users have elevated permissions and can access sensitive systems, applications, and data. As a result, they are a prime target for cybercriminals looking to gain unauthorised access to your IT infrastructure.
To address these risks, organisations need to implement proper governance of privileged accounts and users. This includes identifying all privileged accounts and users, defining their roles and responsibilities, and establishing policies and procedures for managing their access to critical IT resources.
Privileged accounts and users can become a major liability without proper governance, exposing your organisation to data breaches, theft, and other security incidents. Many high-profile data breaches and cyber-attacks have been attributed to compromised privileged accounts and users in recent years.
That’s where Privileged Access Management (PAM) comes in. PAM solutions provide an integrated approach to managing privileged access by combining identity governance, access management, and advanced monitoring and analytics capabilities. Organisations can gain complete visibility and control over privileged accounts and users by implementing PAM. This enables them to detect and prevent unauthorised access, enforce the least privilege, and reduce the risk of insider threats.
Proper governance of privileged accounts and users is critical for effective PAM. Organisations can better protect their most sensitive assets and reduce the risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches by ensuring that all privileged accounts and users are identified, managed, and monitored.
How Zero Standing Privileges Can Increase Your Security To Protect The Most Sensitive Accesses In Your IT Landscape
Privileged accounts and users have access to your organisation’s most sensitive information and IT systems, making them an attractive target for cyber attacks. It is essential to properly govern these accounts and users to prevent unauthorised access and ensure compliance with regulations. Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions provide a framework to manage, monitor and control privileged access to critical IT assets.
One of the core concepts of PAM is zero standing privileges. This approach ensures that privileged access is only granted to users on a “just-in-time” basis for the specific tasks that they need to perform. This means that privileged users do not have continuous access to sensitive systems, reducing the risk of malicious or accidental misuse of privileges.
Zero-standing privileges also provide a detailed audit trail of privileged activity, allowing organisations to quickly identify and investigate suspicious or unauthorised activity. This approach is critical to a strong security posture and compliance with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and SOX regulations.
Implementing a zero-standing privilege model requires careful planning and coordination between IT, security, and business teams. The first step is to identify all privileged accounts and users, including service accounts and third-party vendors, and classify them based on the level of access they require. Next, organisations should establish a process for requesting, approving, and revoking privileged access and ensure that all access requests are fully audited.
Organisations can enforce zero-standing privileges using PAM solutions that provide just-in-time privileged access, session recording, and automatic credential rotation. These solutions can also integrate with other security tools like SIEM and threat intelligence platforms, enabling proactive threat detection and response.
Conclusion
Privileged access management is critical to securing your organisation’s most sensitive information and IT systems. Implementing a zero-standing privileges model is essential to achieving proper governance of privileged accounts and users. By reducing the risk of unauthorised access, organisations can strengthen their security posture, achieve compliance with regulations, and protect their valuable assets.
