Why CISOs Should Prioritize Securing Privileged Access

Privileged accounts are a gold mine for cybercriminals and bad actors. As organizations continue to work-from-home, cybersecurity leaders must implement modern privileged access management (PAM) solutions. Chad Carter, VP Sales North America, WALLIX, discusses how modern PAM solutions offer holistic protection to critical IT assets and data and why now is the right time for every CISO to prioritize PAM.

The work-from-home trend may be here to stay, but it’s a challenge for cybersecurity professionals. Millions of office workers are now logging onto company systems from home, coffee shops or anywhere else where they can get WiFi, which expands the threat landscape. Companies need to protect login credentials and monitor access to guard against data loss. 

Managing privileged access to sensitive data has to be a top priority because, as GartnerOpens a new window noted in its Top 10 Security Projects list last year, privileged accounts are a major target for cybercriminals. The explosive growth in working from home — and therefore remote access — has only made the environment that much more target-rich since an administrative or other highly-empowered account allows unfettered access to sensitive data. 

A Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution can help you gain control and reduce risks. PAM deployment makes everyone’s job easier, and PAM solutions have evolved in important ways, making them more effective and easier to deploy than ever before. Putting an effective PAM solution in place doesn’t have to be a massive, months-long task — it can be up and running in a matter of hours or days.

Learn More: How to Get Identity & Access Management (IAM) Right, Finally

Don’t Give the Plumber the Combination to the Safe

A PAM deployment protects company assets by controlling access and permissions for users, accounts, processes and systems. In this way, PAM reduces the attack surface, helping companies prevent and mitigate threats coming from inside or outside the company’s IT environment. It’s like limiting access to spaces in your home when contractors are in to do specific tasks. 

Say you have a clogged kitchen sink that requires attention from a plumber. If you were away from home at the time the plumber was scheduled to arrive, perhaps you’d leave a key so they could access the house, but you wouldn’t provide a combination to your safe or a key to the car in your garage. The plumber doesn’t need that to do the job. 

PAM works in a similar way, granting employees and contractors access to the applications and data they need to do their jobs whether they are working from home, offsite, or at company headquarters. With a robust PAM solution, every session where an employee or contractor superadmin interacts with critical IT assets is recorded, including the resources they access and the keystrokes they use. When they exit the system, the access key is changed. 

Learn More:  How Endpoint Security Can Help Enterprises Tackle IT Strain

Modern PAM Offers Holistic Protection

Most cybersecurity professionals understand the expansion of the threat landscape and may be aware that a PAM solution could help. But there’s a widespread misconception about PAM solutions, due to how they’ve evolved recently. The good news is that modern PAM solutions offer holistic protection against today’s biggest threats, and they are relatively quick and simple to deploy. 

Depending on the PAM solution you choose, you can cover multiple cybersecurity bases with a single deployment, gaining an effective way to manage and control access and privilege elevation with one solution. 

These capabilities are especially important with so many people working from home using network devices that provide privileged access to critical IT assets and data. An agentless solution is lightweight and easy to deploy, optimizing IT teams’ time and minimizing the impact on productivity. And with a modern PAM solution, privileged sessions are tracked and recorded, enabling complete oversight of activity in sensitive resources, facilitating proof of compliance with cybersecurity regulations, and protecting privileged assets in the corporate network. 

An ideal PAM solution can also integrate seamlessly with endpoint protection and multifactor authentication for additional layers of protection.

While the pandemic may have spurred concern about remote access risk and privileged access management in the short-term when people were unsure of how long lockdowns would last, there’s plenty of reason to believe the work-from-home setup is here to stay. Many companies are seeing an opportunity to slash real estate costs, and workers are enthusiastic about spending less time commuting. 

The challenge for IT and cybersecurity professionals will be adapting resources to reduce risks and increase productivity in an increasingly-external workforce. Finding the right PAM solution — one that offers access management, session monitoring and recording, password management, along with native integrations with the expanded cybersecurity ecosystem of identity management and endpoint security — should be a top priority.  

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