A Full Life Cycle Solution for Managing The Most Privileged Accounts

In the digital era, credentials (such as passwords) are a part of everyone’s life. However, many of them grant access to crucial functions, such as changing domain controller settings or transferring funds from an organization’s accounts. Privileged accounts are the names given to these types of accounts.

As a result, in an era of increased regulatory requirements, such as new data protection laws like the LGPD and GDPR, ensuring the security of credentials that grant access to privileged accounts is more than just a matter of reducing cyber risks and avoiding millionaire sanctions; it’s also a matter of ensuring business continuity.

Proper Privileged Access Security protects keys (credentials) that can, in the wrong hands, open doors that expose the company to cybersecurity problems. Thus, because of their importance and high impact, privileged credentials are a favorite target for malicious attackers.

According to Gartner

by 2022, 70% of organizations will implement PAM practices for all their use cases, an increase of 40% compared to today.

How to implement Privileged Access Management?

1- To begin, map and identify all assets connected to the environment, as well as their associated credentials (e.g. passwords) and digital certificates. By scanning and analysing the entire network, a PAM solution must be able to discover, register, and manage various devices, credentials, and digital certificates. Furthermore, the tool must guarantee that any account has enough privileges to fulfil the duties allocated to it, reducing or eliminating privileges as needed. 

In this method, the idea of least privilege can be implemented, resulting in a balance of efficiency and security. This is the initial phase in the privileged access life cycle, and it must be completed before access may be granted.

2- A PAM solution should allow administrators to define which users have access to a credential’s password for physical access, as well as which users can utilise the solution’s remote access to access a target device, system, or application.

All system sessions must be video and text recorded, guaranteeing that any activity taken on the system can be monitored and audited later, allowing you to determine the source of a cyber event or meet audit requirements. Furthermore, depending on user usage profiles, the PAM solution must be able to detect, notify, and respond to any questionable behaviour from users.

3- Now that we’ve handled the accesses and permissions and completed the essential tasks in the environment, we’re ready to move on to the third step of the life cycle: reviewing all that was done with the PAM solution’s assets. 

During the accesses made in the preceding stage, the solution must be able to recognise and allow solution administrators to audit probable privilege violations or abuses. As a result, it is possible to ensure the traceability of all activities taken, making the auditing of all setups easier.

What role does CyberArk’s PAS play?

CyberArk’s Privileged Access Security is a full life-cycle solution for managing the most privileged accounts and SSH Keys in the enterprise. It enables organizations to secure, provision, manage, control and monitor all activities associated with all types of privileged identities, such as:

• Administrator on a Windows server
• Root on a UNIX server
• Cisco Enable on a Cisco device
• Embedded passwords found in applications and scripts

What are the main benefits of CyberArk’s PAS solution?

• Set the main policy rules that define how you manage accounts in your organization using the Master Policy.

• Utilize a secure Digital Vault to store, protect, manage and control access to Privileged Accounts and SSH Keys at a centralized point using a robust policy management engine.

• The PAS solution offers a simple access control interface that easily pinpoints who is entitled to use privileged accounts and SSH Keys and initiate a privileged session, when and why.

• As a central control point, the PAS solution also provides privileged single sign-on for initiating privileged sessions, as well as recording any activities that occurred during these sessions.

• The PAS solution provides sophisticated and transparent solutions for securing and managing critical applications as well as Application Server accounts, and eliminating the use of hard-coded and embedded passwords, making them invisible to developers and support staff.

• The PAS solution provides an easy way to create audit reports required by Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI and more. It allows enterprises to enforce corporate security policies to ensure compliance with regulatory needs and security best practices related to access and usage of privileged accounts and SSH Keys for both human and application (unattended) access.

• The PAS solution eliminates manual administration and overhead by providing instant and automatic changing of passwords for thousands of network devices and applications, including scripts and parameter files. Its high level of automation ensures highly reliable and uninterrupted service with minimal administrator overhead and increased productivity.

• With an industry leading performance, scalability and robustness, the PASsolution can protect and manage up to hundreds of thousands of passwords and SSH Keys across a highly heterogeneous IT environment, with complex and distributed network architectures.

• The PAS solution ensures quick deployment and implementation proven in over 400 enterprise customers, providing immediate ROI by improving IT productivity.

Securing Privileged Identities is Important

Through improved Privileged Access Management maturity, a PAM system and its related procedures must be implemented in a way that considers the whole life cycle of privileged access, from the providing of access to its realisation to the verification of activities performed in the environment.
Security teams can only be certain that their “keys” are appropriately safeguarded against hostile agents and other threats if they choose a solution that considers all parts of this life cycle. You need to have an effective method in place. Technosprout follows an effective PAM methodology, which has been reviewed by CyberArk. If the business wants to avoid multi million fines due to security breaches owing to inadequate management of access to privileged environments in the age of LGPD and GDPR, it must assure compliance with cybersecurity standards and data protection legislation.