Every user account isn't created equal.
There are user accounts with broader and elevated access permissions. These are known as privileged accounts, and they need to be managed with care.
Privileged access management deals with monitoring and handling such user accounts to protect them against cyber attacks. Organizations use privileged access management systems to bring all privileged accounts on a single system to minimize the attack surfaces and ensure seamless auditing.
What is privileged access management?
Privileged access management (PAM) is the process of managing privileged identities with special access rights than standard user identity. Both human users and machine identities or applications are covered under PAM.
Privileged access management is sometimes referred to as privileged identity management (PIM) or privileged account management, or simply privilege management. Although the preferred name of the process can vary, the underlying idea of controlling elevated access for end-users, systems, accounts, and processes remains the same. Privilege management typically falls under the umbrella of identity and access management (IAM) that allows businesses to control user accounts and credentials while ensuring comprehensive visibility and ease of performing audits.
Companies provide privileged access permissions to certain accounts to run a business efficiently and ensure hassle-free operations. They have more rights and privileges that make them a potential target of identity theft, leading to a catastrophic cyber attack.
Malicious hackers look for such accounts that can give them control of an organization’s sensitive data, processes, and people. As devices are becoming more and more interconnected, privileged access management systems have become crucial for organizations to protect themselves against data breaches.
Types of privileged access
Privileged access can be used by two different entities: humans and machines. Take a look at the common types of privileged access prevalent in organizations.
How humans use privileged access
Some roles require humans to use elevated access rights and permissions, including:
- Domain administrators: User accounts with rights to control all workstations and servers in a network using domain administrator privileges.
- Superusers: Administrative accounts that can configure changes in systems or applications. These accounts have user provisioning and de-provisioning abilities that you can use to add, modify, or remove user accounts.
- Local administrators: Accounts situated on a workstation or an endpoint that require user credentials to authenticate and make changes to local systems or devices.
- Firecall accounts: User accounts with administrator privileges and access to secure systems. These are used in emergencies and are often referred to as emergency accounts or break glass accounts.
- Privileged business users: Users that don't belong to IT departments but have access to sensitive information on finance, employee success, or marketing teams.
- Secure socket shell (SSH) key: Access control protocols that provide root access to critical systems. In Linux or Unix operating systems (OS), the root has access to all files and commands by default.
How machines use privileged access
Machines use privileged access in a variety of ways, which include:
- Secure socket shell keys: Automated processes also use SSH keys to gain root access to critical systems.
- Service accounts: Applications and services use these accounts to access and make changes to OS configurations.
- Application accounts: Accounts specific to an application that are used to manage users' access rights to the application.
- Secret: An umbrella term frequently used by the DevOps team to describe SSH keys, application programming interface (API) keys, and several other credentials that provide privileged access.
These privileges, if exploited, can result in significant financial and reputational losses for organizations.
34%
of identity-related breaches in the last two years involved compromising privileged user accounts.
Source: IDS Alliance
Privileged access management ensures that limited users are given the least access privileges, reducing the organization's attack surface and mitigating insider threats.
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Why is PAM important?
As organizations continue to embrace workflow automation, including, Cloud, DevOps, and IoT, non-human identities that require privileged access to communicate and operate have surged. These non-human identities are often tricker to control, manage, and sometimes even identify.
Privileged access management considers all identities, human or machine, which operate on-premise, via cloud, or within hybrid environments while ensuring strict access controls and anomaly detection. It minimizes an organization's attack surface and makes it less prone to cyber threats.
49%
of organizations have at least some users with more access privileges than they need to do their jobs.
Source: Cybersecurity Insiders
PAM helps businesses meet compliance requirements by recording all logs and privileged activities. Altogether, PAM paves the way for easy auditing that allows companies to adhere to various regulatory compliances.
Privilege management involves removing local admin account rights on workstations to prevent attackers from elevating privilege access and moving laterally from one system to another. PAM strategy is put together with the fact that humans are the weakest link in an organization's cybersecurity. They can be socially engineered to reveal their user credentials, putting the entire cyber defense in jeopardy. Sometimes, if a social engineering attack is successful, an attacker can pose as a privileged insider to exploit elevated access rights and feed their malicious motives.
Privileged identity management keeps a tab on users' access permissions and ensures minimal access to perform their jobs. Whenever the PAM software detects unusual activity, it alerts the security and IT teams who can prevent account abuse and remediate the security risks.
Various other reasons that make PAM an essential part of the overall cybersecurity strategy are as follows:
- Enhances visibility and awareness: PAM ensures that IT and security teams have complete visibility over all accounts and their privileges. It helps them remove dormant accounts, records of people who have left the company, and many other backdoors that can be potential attack surfaces.
- Controls provisioning: Privileged access management ensures that users' access rights are modified as they evolve in an organization while following the principle of least privileges.
- Prevents accounts sharing: PAM ensures that accounts and credentials aren't shared between individuals as it becomes difficult to tie any unusual activity to a particular user.
- Enforces PAM best practices: PAM centralizes privileged identities and their management that are often siloed across different teams in an organization. It allows for an organization-wide implementation of PAM best practices and reduces risks emanating from inconsistent privilege management.
How does PAM work?
The first step in privileged access management is the identification of privileged accounts. When you have detected all of the privileged accounts, decide on the policies that you want to enforce on these accounts. Make sure your PAM strategy includes all people, processes, and technologies in your organization so that there are no gaps in the control and management of elevated access rights and permissions.
The next step is to choose a PAM tool that suits your needs. If you wish to try a free PAM first, you can select and compare the best free privileged access management software. These software reduce administrative complexity by automating discovery, management, and monitoring of privileged user accounts.
Implementing a PAM solution helps businesses condense attack surfaces by leveraging automation, enabling you to effectively monitor and manage user privileges.
Common privileged access management challenges
Businesses run into many challenges while monitoring and managing their privileged accounts.
Here are a few common PAM challenges that businesses face:
- Manual privileges management: Many organizations rely on a manual process to manage privileges. It increases the complexity of the process and makes it less effective and error-prone.
- De-centralized PAM: Companies find it challenging to bring all privileged accounts together under a single platform to manage privileges.
- Ineffective access control: It becomes trickier for businesses to prove compliance as organizations struggle to control privileged user access to cloud platforms, SaaS, and other applications.
- Improper threat analysis: Businesses often lack tools to conduct comprehensive threat analysis or software solutions that can detect real-time anomalies on privileged sessions.
Apart from these, organizations face the challenge of protecting themselves against cyber attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in Kerberos authentication protocol, where attackers masquerade as genuine users and gain access to critical assets.
Organizations can address these challenges by introducing and adopting privileged access management systems. PAMs gather all privileged accounts on a unified platform, monitor and manage privileged access security controls, and provide actionable insights during anomalies.
Benefits of privileged access management
PAM involves managing select users in a company with special privileges to perform business-critical functions like resetting passwords, making modifications to IT infrastructure, and so on. It safeguards such accounts against unauthorized access, enabling companies to avoid serious risks.
Privileged access management prevents a security breach and restricts its scope if it occurs.
There are various benefits that PAM can offer, including:
- Minimizing attack surface: PAM bridges security gaps created by identity mismanagement. It applies the principle of least privilege organization-wide to identify over privileged accounts and takes measures to restrict their access rights.
- Decreasing malware infections: There are malware that need elevated privileges to infect a system or network. PAM prevents them from installing by downsizing access permissions.
- Reducing downtime: By restricting elevated access privileges, users don't run into incompatibility issues between systems and applications, reducing downtime risks.
- Facilitating seamless audits: PAM brings all privileged identities in one place and keeps track of user activities (with the help of logging systems), enabling hassle-free audits.
- Restraining credential sharing: PAM encourages everyone to use unique user accounts to tie any unusual behavior to a particular account during a security incident.
Top 5 privileged access management solutions
Privileged access management software helps organizations monitor and manage their privileged account credentials effectively. It enables seamless implementation of the least privilege policy and ensures that the business is safe from external hacking risks or internal misuse of elevated privileges.
To qualify for inclusion in the privileged access management software list, a product must:
- Enable system administrators to create and provision privileged accounts
- Allow storage of privileged credentials in a secure password vault
- Maintain a log of activities around privileged accounts and monitor them
*Below are the five leading privileged access management software from G2's Summer 2021 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
1. JumpCloud
JumpCloud is a zero-trust directory platform that customers use to authenticate, authorize and manage users, devices, and applications. It modernizes the directory with a cloud platform that unifies devices and identity management across all types of IT resources.
What users like:
"The platform comes with pre-made plug' n play policies for all major platforms. Why bind a Mac to AD when the platforms just weren't meant for one another? I can confidently say that being an IT administrator through the pandemic would have been 10x more difficult without JumpCloud. This platform allows us to continue driving major roadmap projects despite a remote workforce, such as migrating to JumpCloud MDM and deploying new apps via JumpCloud commands and VPP.
These powerful features allow us to professionalize our IT offerings, leaps and bounds beyond where we were. From allowing cross-platform users to self-service password rotations to querying the environment with the fantastic Powershell Module, JumpCloud is an impressive offering that has been rock solid for our organization. The great documentation never hurts, either!"
- JumpCloud Review, Robert R.
What users dislike:
"Pricing can add up quickly. You should carefully plan out your implementation strategy so that you can look at different pricing scenarios and not overbuy. We are also working through strategies for security revolving around password resets and lost/stolen mobile devices."
- JumpCloud Review, David Y.
2. Microsoft Azure Active Directory
Microsoft Azure Active Directory is a cloud-based identity and access management service that engages internal and external users securely on a single platform. It provides developer tools that easily integrate identity into applications and services.
What users like:
"Even the most inexperienced user will find it straightforward thanks to excellent documentation for all of the services. Overall, the Azure Technical team and the community have been really helpful.
Azure provides a complete life cycle solution. There are various options available, spanning from development through deployment automation. It uses custom hook-points to integrate on-premises resources. Azure Functions, in my opinion, is the most user-friendly serverless option. It's straightforward to ship Node.js functions without requiring dependencies to be packaged. It also has proactive and responsive support."
- Microsoft Azure Active Directory Review, Athira N.
What users dislike:
"The negative factor of this application is that it can only be controlled on the web and cannot be installed on Android, Mac, and Windows. It needs reforms in this area. Log in capabilities are somewhat buggy and need to be dealt with. The customer services and support need to be further evaluated and well explained for better comprehension. It's a bit expensive for beginners, and modeling a certain data needs to be further improved."
- Microsoft Azure Active Directory Review, Ford A.
3. Ping Identity
Ping Identity platform provides users access to cloud, mobile, software as a service (SaaS), and on-premise applications and APIs while managing identity and ensuring scalability. It offers flexible options to extend hybrid IT environments and accelerates business initiatives with multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), access management, and data governance capabilities.
What users like:
"Ping utilizes open standards that help increase its interoperability with other applications. This use of open standards and overall stability makes it an excellent platform to base user authentication upon. The provided upgrade utility makes upgrades easy to perform. The professional services group from Ping is excellent and has been a true partner during implementation and other projects."
- Ping Identity Review, Anthony S.
What users dislike:
"OAuth connection configurations can be confusing. How attribute contracts are fulfilled can be a little difficult to understand. Also, the documentation on the site often has dead internal links."
- Ping Identity Review, Rob S.
4. AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager allows users to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and several other secrets throughout their lifecycle. It helps businesses protect secrets needed to access services, applications, and other IT resources.
What users like:
"Like in every AWS service, the link with an IAM role is seamless, allowing you to grant explicit permissions to credentials stored in Secrets Manager to a specific instance/container/etc.
It's managed efficiently and integrates with other services, such as existing RDS instances, automatically. It allows rotating credentials a much easier task."
- AWS Secrets Manager Review, Administrator in Computer Software
What users dislike:
"Very expensive considering what you're paying for. Some bugs in the console sometimes (it doesn't mess with data)."
- AWS Secrets Manager Review, Administrator in Government Administration
5. SecureLink for Enterprise
SecureLink for Enterprise provides a purpose-built privileged remote access platform that allows businesses to comply with industry regulations and ensure vendor accountability. It enables enterprises to address challenges related to authentication, provisioning, and auditing a rotating population of support technicians.
What users like:
"The best feature of SecureLink is that their platform is not over complicated for any IT professional at any level. Their UI is easy to interact with and administrate. All secured complexities are integrated into the backend of the software by the SecureLink developers. This makes the SecureLink platform a dream come true for any busy IT professional who wants to provide effective vendor support solutions to their business, but also something that will not require hours of attention taken away from your day-to-day."
- SecureLink for Enterprise Review, Steve A.
What users dislike:
"The one feature I wish SecureLink had was the ability to upload our own logo. I wish the mobile app added a little more functionality as, at the moment, it only allows you to approve pending requests. If it could disable access or change current access, I believe it would be more helpful."
- SecureLink for Enterprise Review, Robert F.
Enforce the least privileges policy
Focus on the core of privileged access management, which involves adopting the least privilege policy across your organization. PAM software will help you centralize all privileged accounts and provide them with a unified PAM strategy, covering all attack surfaces exposed due to siloed privileged account management.
Build a robust IAM program in your organization with an efficient PAM strategy.
Learn more about identity governance to define, manage, and review the IAM policies of your organization.
Sagar Joshi
Sagar Joshi is a former content marketing specialist at G2 in India. He is an engineer with a keen interest in data analytics and cybersecurity. He writes about topics related to them. You can find him reading books, learning a new language, or playing pool in his free time.
