It is rightly said that “With great powers comes great responsibility.” When people assume positions of power, they become even more responsible for looking after their subordinates and keeping their practices in check. However, misuse of power is easy and can hamper an organization’s overall well-being. To prevent such misuse, the power and privileges enjoyed by higher authorities should be kept under check.
This is why privileged access management (PAM) is important in an organization’s IT infrastructure.
Let us dive a little deeper and understand this important set of strategies.
What Is Privileged Access Management?
Privileged access management is a robust identity security solution designed to monitor, detect, and prevent unauthorized privileged access to specific accounts within an organization. It comprises a set of cybersecurity strategies that monitor and control the access and permissions granted to the “privileged” identities in an organization.
Privileged identities or users often have access to an organization’s critical resources. They also have the power to grant or revoke access and permissions of other accounts. With seamless privileged access management, you can keep these powers under check and prevent their misuse. PAM is a seamless blend of technology, people, and processes to obtain visibility into the people using privileged accounts in an organization. It is also useful in obtaining insights into the tasks performed by privileged users while they are logged in.
It is important to understand the distinction between identity access management (IAM) and privileged access management. IAM facilitates the authentication of different identities within an organization so that the right user is given the right access at the right time. On the other hand, PAM deals with more granular visibility, control, and auditing of the access given to privileged identities/users in an organization’s IT infrastructure.
Use Cases Of Privileged Access Management
Here are a few primary use cases of privileged access management in an organization:
- Security Risk Mitigation
A robust privileged access management solution allows an organization to mitigate risks by securing privileged identities (human and machine) in a tamper-resistant repository.
- Enhancing Audit And Compliance
PAM improves an organization’s audit and compliance, helping it meet internal requirements, maintain a centralized audit, and manage access given to privileged identities.
- Improving Visibility And Situational Awareness
With PAM, an organization can improve the visibility of the actions performed, access given, and permissions granted to privileged accounts. High situational awareness helps you assess your company’s IT infrastructure and the changes within the same in the wake of different circumstances over time.
- Enhancing Digitization
A powerful PAM solution also reduces your operational costs and complexity by authenticating privileged users with VPN-less access from a centralized web portal in the most secure way possible.
Understanding Privilege-related Risks And Challenges
Organizations implement PAM solutions to tackle privilege-related risks and challenges that threaten their integrity and security. Let us have a look at some of these risks a PAM solution helps you overcome:
- A Lack Of Visibility And Awareness Of Privileges Users
Organizations often have active privileged accounts that are long-forgotten. These accounts, also known as orphan accounts, can become gateways for attackers, including the organization’s former employees retaining access. A lack of awareness and visibility allows such accounts to sabotage an organization’s security.
Moreover, some cloud accounts and identities may blur the line between privileged and unprivileged access. Inadequate understanding of the access granted to such accounts can compromise an organization’s IT security.
- Over-provisioning Of Privileges
Just like a lack of privilege access restrictions is harmful for an organization, overly restrictive privilege access is also not the best scenario to operate in. Such a situation disrupts user workflows and hampers productivity. On the other hand, excessive privilege leads to a bloated attack surface. As an employee’s role is often fluid, they may retain certain privileges even after no longer being in a position of relevant power.
- Shared Accounts And Passwords
It is common for IT teams to share root, Windows Administrator, and other privileged credentials for the sake of convenience and shared duties. However, when multiple people have shared access, it becomes difficult to trace actions performed on a specific account to specific individuals, leading to security, audit, and compliance issues.
- Hard-coded/Embedded Credentials
The IT infrastructure of an organization needs privileged credentials to facilitate app-to-app (A2A) and application-to-database (A2D) authentication. Your applications, network devices, systems, and IoT devices may be deployed and shipped using embedded default credentials. These credentials are often easily guessable, resulting in security risks.
Moreover, the employees in your organization may hardcode secrets in plain text (in a script, code, or file) to make them easily accessible when needed.
- Manual And/Or Decentralized Credential Management
Unfortunately, the privileged security controls in an organization are often immature. Privileged accounts and credentials are often managed differently across organizational silos. This leads to inconsistent enforcement of the best IT security practices.
It is almost impossible for human privilege management processes to scale in an organization, as millions of privileged accounts, identities, and users may exist simultaneously. Such a situation prompts humans to take shortcuts like re- using their credentials across different assets and accounts. This way, a single jeopardized account can compromise the security of all the accounts with the same credentials.
- A Lack Of Application And Service Account Privilege Visibility
Applications and services within an organization’s IT infrastructure often execute privileged processes and perform specific actions automatically. These actions also include communicating with other applications, resources, services, etc.
Application and service accounts often possess excessive privileged access rights by default, making them prone to serious security deficiencies.
- Siloed Identity Management Tools And Processes
Modern IT infrastructures run across multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.) and environments (on-premise, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.). As these platforms and environments are managed independently, it often leads to inconsistencies in IT administration. It also increases the complexities for end users, making your resources vulnerable to cyber threats.
Key Features Of Privileged Access Management
Now that we know what PAM is and the challenges it resolves, let us have a quick look at its features:
- Just-in-time Access
A PAM solution allows privileged users to have just-in-time access to critical resources. This way, you can limit prolonged exposure to these resources even to the users having privileged rights.
- Secure Remote Access With Encrypted Gateways
PAM surpasses the conventional password-based authentication to allow remote access to users. Encrypted gateways secure the resources against cyberattacks from potential external and internal threats.
- Privileged Session Monitoring
A robust PAM solution will monitor sessions of privileged users and accounts to facilitate investigative audits. This makes it easier to detect inconsistencies or suspicious activities during each session.
- Analyzing Unusual Privilege Activity
The access and permissions given to every privileged user are clearly defined. A PAM solution closely monitors the activities performed by these users and detects any unusual activity that may threaten your system’s security.
- Capturing Privileged Account Events
Privileged access management captures all privileged account events to facilitate a thorough compliance audit.
- Generating Detailed Reports
A PAM solution makes the assessment of privileged users and their activities by generating detailed reports. These reports help you ensure that the human and machine privilege accounts/users are not overstepping their privileges.
Types Of Privileged Accounts
Privileged accounts are the accounts that are given specific access and permission that other accounts (standard and guest user accounts) do not possess.
Here are the different types of privileged accounts existing within an organization’s IT infrastructure:
- Service Account: This is an account used by a service or an application to interact with the operating system in a secure way.
- Local Administrative Account: These privileged accounts have admin control over specific workstations or servers. They are generally created to perform maintenance tasks.
- Break Glass Account: Also called an emergency account, a break glass account provides admin access to unprivileged users. This makes your system secure in the case of disruption.
- Active Directory Account: Also known as a domain administrative account, this privileged account has access to all servers and workstations across your domain. These accounts also control admin accounts, system configurations, and group memberships.
- Business Privileged User Account: These privileged accounts possess top-tier privileges based on specific job responsibilities.
- Application Admin Account: This account is provided with full access to one or more applications along with the data stored therein.
PAM Solution And Design Flow
In the age of digitization, organizations prefer implementing increasingly automated PAM solutions to streamline their processes and ensure comprehensive security. The more automated your PAM solution is, the more vigilant your organization will be in shielding itself from internal and external cyberattacks.
Whether you implement an on-premise PAM solution or resort to a cloud- based service provider, its design flow will contain the following key elements:
- Access Request
It all starts when a privileged user requests access to specific resources, systems, or applications.
- Privileged Password Management
This is a discipline that protects your company’s critical resources from privileged users in a secure way. When a user requests access, the PAM solution would trigger approval rules to assess the access and permissions they have. Privileged password management protects human and non-human privileged user accounts and manages privileged credentials from a tamper- proof password safe.
App-to-app password management (AAPM) plays an important role here. The PAM solution ensures that the credentials of privileged accounts used for app- to-app and app-to-database are secured and managed effectively. The solution will also automatically remove embedded credentials from the code, vault the credentials, and apply best practices to all privileged credentials within your organization to ensure uncompromised security.
Once the access is granted, the privileged account in your organization can start its session with servers, workstations, devices, applications, social media, cloud, or other relevant resources.
- Privileged Session Management
Privileged session management is all about monitoring and managing the sessions of privileged users within your organization after they receive access to critical resources. From recording and replaying sessions to maintaining audit logs and archive logs, it ensures that all the activities performed by privileged users are critically examined.
With such a robust design flow, your PAM solution keeps cyberattacks and other IT security threats at bay.
The Final Word
An identity security solution like privileged access management is necessary to control the privileges granted to specific human and non-human accounts. With a robust and automated PAM solution, you can keep a strict check on every privileged user accessing your organization’s critical resources. It ensures that no entity has the authority to surpass checks and functions above and beyond your organization’s IT security measures. If you wish your IT infrastructure to be rock-solid, get in touch with an authorized professional to implement the best PAM solution within your organization.