The digital revolution has changed the business landscape and simplified critical business processes. Digitalization of business processes and technology implementation have also brought many advantages and challenges. One of the common challenges today's organizations face is cyberattacks.
Cyber attacks are international acts to gain unauthorized access to steal or destroy organizational digital assets such as applications, data, critical infrastructure intellectual property, applications, devices, etc.
To protect from evolving cyber attacks, global organizations spend a lot of money implementing security frameworks and tools such as firewalls, antivirus, endpoint protection, malware detection, Identity security, and more.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is one security measure businesses implement to protect susceptible data from cyber-attacks. It falls under the identity management segment. This blog discusses the standard features offered by any PAM solution.
Privileged access management (PAM) is a subset of Identity access management (IAM) designed to control and monitor privileged users. Privileged users have additional or elevated access to critical business data, assets, and infrastructure.
Privileged Access Management (PAM ) involves a set of cybersecurity strategies and tools that allow only authorized users to access resources and minimize cyberattacks. The major aim of any PAM solution is to enforce “Least Privilege,” which means restricting access rights as minimally as possible to perform required operations.
A privileged account is a person, system, or device with elevated or higher permissions than normal users to access critical organizational resources. As privileged accounts have elevated access, they are prone to higher risk from attacks compared to general or non-privileged accounts.
Following are the examples of Privileged Accounts:
Privileged credentials are the passwords associated with PAM users that provide elevated access to resources, applications, and systems. In a DevOps environment, these Credentials are called secrets. Managing Privileged credentials is a critical task, as 80% of security breaches are caused by compromised privileged passwords.
We have many enterprise-grade advanced PAM solutions with unique functionalities and advanced features in the market. Following are some of the well-known and widely used PAM solutions:
Every organization has unique PAM requirements based on data, assets, employee base, level of operations, etc. When choosing a PAM solution, some critical features should be present, and without them, it's quite challenging to fulfill the requirements.
Following are some standard features, and let's explore them one by one:
Password Vaulting is a mechanism for storing and managing privileged account passwords from a centralized location. It is a key component of any privileged Access Management system that monitors the end-to-end activity of PAM accounts. It stores the passwords of different users and applications in an encrypted way. The vault also controls who should access what resources and for how long.
Some PAM solutions offer advanced evaluating features such as workflow-based access, password rotation, etc.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is another Important feature of any PAM solution that acts as an additional layer of protection. Whenever a user tries to access a source or application, it asks for two-step verification, such as a password or biometric. MFA is primarily designed to prevent identity theft, password breaches, and illegal access.
Password management is one of the critical components of any PAM solution and offers facilities like auto-generation of new passwords, handling access permissions, policy implementation, etc. It helps you gain greater control and lowers the risk of privileged attacks.
Remote Access is one of the vital features that a Privileged access management solution offers. It allows its employees to securely access the data and resources that they need to do their jobs from remote locations. This feature eliminates the cyber attacks associated with workfrom or remote employee working processes and streamlines processes.
A session is a monitored activity of a user while accessing critical resources and systems. Session Management is a process of recording the activities of privileged users. In cybersecurity, each privileged user is assigned sessions. Session management features equip organizations with the capability to record and store both command-line and video recordings of privileged sessions.
Real-time threat detection is one of the highly useful features of any PAM solution to prevent major data breaches. Modern PAM solutions use AI and ML technology to detect unusual privilege activities and alert security professionals to take swift action before the situation worsens.
Disaster recovery is one of the core features of today's PAM solutions. To protect against unusual disasters, PAM solutions are developing failover safeguard systems.
Auditing and reporting are useful features of today's PAM solutions. They allow users to analyze vast volumes of data with simplified dashboards and charts.
Massively growing data breaches have made it mandatory to build robust security infrastructure to fight against any sort of cyber threat. Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a crucial cybersecurity strategy designed to protect susceptible and highly targeted areas by cyber attackers. For Cybersecurity training, you can approach techsolidity, and we are happy to upskill you to work on real-world projects.
By Tech Solidity
Last updated on July 5, 2024
