How Cloud PAM Can Improve Your Security Posture

A PAM solution should provide a dynamic approach to secure privileged access. This enables security officers to observe, monitor and track select account activity in real-time to spot anomalous behavior or potential abuse before a breach occurs.

Look for features such as just-in-time access and zero-standing privileges to reduce the risk of exploitation by malicious insiders or outside attackers. Also, consider a centralized management platform to avoid requiring teams to manage separate vaults and tools.

Increased Efficiency

PAM addresses the need to enhance cybersecurity protections by implementing the principle of least privilege for administrator accounts and reducing the likelihood of privileged account credentials getting stolen and perpetrators gaining access to sensitive assets in data centers. Additionally, PAM minimizes the risk of malicious code launching from a compromised account and the subsequent damage that could result.

A strong security posture is a preventative measure that requires continuous monitoring to keep pace with ever-changing threats and vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals are constantly improving their attack tactics, and the recent wave of high-profile data breaches has made it clear that current security methods don’t offer enough defense.

By leveraging PAM in the cloud, organizations can take advantage of a more efficient solution that eliminates the need for costly hardware or software and minimizes resource consumption by providing expert maintenance for patches, upgrades, and new features. Cloud PAM also offers geo-redundancy, autoscaling, uptime SLA and 24/7 monitoring, making it an easy-to-use, effective way to enhance your security posture. It’s a lot less expensive than a data breach.

Increased Visibility

Privileged access management reduces the risk of credential theft, data breaches, and other costly threats that result from attackers gaining access to sensitive systems and assets. It keeps privileged account credentials in a secure vault and requires users to authenticate through the PAM system before being granted access. This method also allows organizations to monitor account activity and enforce least privilege access policies required by multiple compliance regulations and security frameworks.

Using the right tools is critical to success with privileged access management. In addition to reducing the risk of hacks and breaches, implementing the right technology solutions can increase business efficiency. For example, PAM can automate granting and revoking access for administrators. This helps reduce the time it takes to onboard new employees and offboard old ones and ensures that accounts aren’t left with unnecessary privileges.

It can also help to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities based on their impact and urgency, making it easier to address them quickly. Additionally, by identifying the most valuable assets in the organization, businesses can create an inventory to leverage when conducting vulnerability assessments and determining risk-based prioritization.

Enhanced Security

Often referred to as analysts and IT leaders, PAM, privileged access management, is one of the top projects for reducing cyber risk and achieving high-security ROI. PAM, part of identity and access management (IAM), provides granular control, visibility, and auditing of privileged accounts, credentials, and session activities. This is an essential component of identity security, a significant focus for reducing vulnerability to data breaches, insider threats, and other cybersecurity risks in a perimeterless work-from-anywhere environment.

Today’s infrastructure environments involve thousands of human and service identities and entitlements that are too dynamic for legacy PAM tools to handle. Consequently, organizations that deploy immature PAM solutions struggle to prevent inappropriate access.

A cloud-based PAM solution is designed to address these challenges and improve the security posture of a business by monitoring, alerting, and preventing unauthorized privileged access. This is critical to meeting the compliance requirements associated with industry regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX. It also addresses security concerns such as insider threats by ensuring that employee access to critical systems is monitored and audited.

Better Compliance

Privileged access management is a critical part of preventing data breaches and cyber-attacks. In addition, it helps to ensure compliance with regulatory standards and industry regulations, such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST 800-53. PAM solutions enforce strict access control for privileged accounts, allowing only authorized users to gain access to sensitive data. They also follow the least privilege principle, which requires users only to have the minimum credentials to perform their work tasks, reducing the potential for unauthorized access and abuse.

In addition, PAM solutions monitor privileged account activity, enabling security teams to identify suspicious behavior and respond quickly to a data breach. This granular visibility and control type is vital in an increasingly perimeter-less, work-from-anywhere world.

A mature PAM solution provides significant operational benefits, including eliminating privileged account/credential coverage gaps, reducing administrative complexity, and improving operational efficiency. A PAM solution can reduce the risk of breaches, mitigate the impact of insider threats, and minimize the potential for costly fines resulting from regulatory violations.

Enhanced Collaboration

Modern software requires accessing multiple infrastructure resources, like databases, Kubernetes clusters, monitoring dashboards, and CI/CD environments. Each of these resources speaks different protocols (like HTTP, SSH, RDP) and uses an additional tool to be accessed. Traditional PAM solutions force engineers to go back and forth between devices whenever they want to access a new resource, slowing them down and causing frustration. PAM in the cloud solves this problem by integrating discovery, vaulting, rotation, and session management with most minor privilege policies and application control to provide security teams with a comprehensive view of their organization’s privileged access management posture. With centralized reporting and alerts, security teams can monitor for suspicious behavior that could threaten their systems and respond before those threats become full-blown attacks. In addition, the scalability of cloud-based PAM allows organizations to deploy it across their entire organization with minimum interruption to workflow. This includes IT departments and developers, test, and DevSecOps personnel. This helps eliminate siloes and increases the speed of incident response to help prevent breaches and data theft.