Privileged Access Management: Why It’s Important for Today’s Organisations

Organisations must recognise that traditional cybersecurity approaches are no longer sustainable. Old methods and products are quite complex, difficult to integrate, as well as hard to manage and can be costly for the company. Today’s organisations must use simpler solutions that alleviate complicated protocols for IT departments and provide seamless integration while establishing a more secure defense system. One of the major IT concerns today is privileged access management (PAM) and security. Security teams and IT security officers prioritise it to minimise the risks of cyberattacks by protecting their companies from unauthorised access.

Where Organisations should Start

The first thing that organisations must do is to secure vital credentials and shut down a go-to attack vector for hackers. They must assess their privileged accounts to determine the importance of privileged access to the company. Because every organisation is unique, it is essential to map out the significant business functions that depend on data, access, and systems. It is recommended to reuse their disaster recovery plan which often classifies the vital systems that must be addressed or recovered first and identify privileged accounts for such systems.

In general, privileged access includes permissions for vital infrastructure, configuring systems, sensitive data, vulnerability scans, patch deployment, and more. Companies can create a comprehensive and specific definition by doing a data impact evaluation that illustrates what the most privileged accounts are protecting to access or enable access to sensitive data.

Ongoing Program for Privileged Access Management

Just like other security measures designed and implemented to help protect vital information assets, privileged account access management requires a continuous approach. Organisations must employ an ongoing program to pair with an advanced strategy.

This program should encompass the following:

• Defining and evaluating privileged accounts. After establishing an organisation’s qualifications for privileged accounts, they must develop IT security policies that cover them. They have to clearly define a privileged account and detail acceptable use policies.

• Discovering privileged accounts. Every company must utilise automatic PAM software to identify their privileged accounts and implement continuous discovery to prevent the sprawl of these accounts, identify possible insider abuse, and disclose outside threats.

• Managing and protecting privileged account passwords. Privileged account access must be proactively supervised and controlled with password protection software. The solution must automatically discover and store privileged accounts. Approaches should include scanning individual privileged session activity, scheduling password rotation, and examining password accounts to detect and respond to malicious activity on time.