Security teams' top priorities have become crystal clear: reducing effort with automation and being audit and compliance-ready. Our recent survey revealed that these reflected the two most pressing objectives for IT security teams, with 26% prioritizing automation and 24% focusing on compliance readiness.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) stands out for its ability to tackle both top priorities simultaneously. PAM ensures that data, systems, and applications can only ever be accessed by those who need to do so, but it needs careful planning, implementation, and integration with your business if it’s to deliver on its potential.
This blog explores how, done right, PAM can help you deliver on your top security priorities – maximizing the efficiency of your security team through automation, easing the burden of compliance, and promoting better security engagement across your organization.
What is PAM, and what are the barriers to maximizing its potential?
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a cybersecurity practice that controls and monitors high-level user accounts with administrative permissions, ensuring only authorized personnel can access critical systems and data while providing complete visibility into their activities. When unauthorized attempts to access resources occur, security teams can quickly detect and respond to these threats.
While PAM has an enormous positive impact in keeping sensitive data, applications, and systems safe, the strategic value of PAM often goes untapped. Many organizations implement PAM reactively, to address a past issue or something that has been brought up in an audit. However, for PAM to drive wider objectives forward, it needs to be deployed and planned with strategy and governance in mind, so that privileged access is right-sized to organizational needs and based on informed decision-making.
How a PAM strategy can deliver on key priorities
So how does a good PAM strategy work in practice? From our extensive experience with PAM deployments, there are three key success factors.
Adopt continuous improvement across solution and strategy
Many PAM solutions get onboarded very quickly to address and mitigate an immediate risk. Once in place, many organizations considered the solution ‘implemented’ and no further changes are made. While this may satisfy C-suite requests for PAM to be addressed, it means there is no ongoing management or update plan in place. This simply isn’t sufficient.
Privileged access requirements change all the time, as job roles and business activities evolve, making an approach of continuous monitoring and improvement is essential. This can uncover privileged accounts that haven’t been onboarded to PAM and/or those who have more access than they really need.
The main benefit of this management approach is that the manual workload can be greatly reduced. That’s because PAM solutions can regularly scan networks for accounts that aren’t onboarded so that security teams can take proactive steps to include them. Furthermore, they can manage, automatically update, and strengthen end-user passwords periodically, so that there is no risk of unauthorized access through old, obsolete credentials, or those that would be easy for a malicious actor to guess or work out.
Tailor the strategy to audit and compliance readiness
Demonstrating how critical infrastructure is protected is a key part of external audits. This includes showing how privileged accounts are secure and accessible only to appropriate people when they need them. Proving this can be difficult and time-consuming without a PAM solution.
The recent spate of high-profile attacks on retailers have thrust the need for privileged account protections further into the spotlight. The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre recently released a blog urging people to “pay specific attention to Domain admin, Enterprise Admin and cloud admin accounts,” all of which come under the traditional definition of a privileged account.
For all companies, especially those subject to audit and regulation, a robust PAM solution will provide critical protection, simplify reporting, and enable access to all the data needed to ensure audit and compliance readiness. Tailored to the specific needs of an organization, the solution should provide logs of who has privileged access at any given time, and how it’s been used, presented in reports, recordings and dashboards. This makes it faster and easier to check that users are doing what they say they’re doing and prevents activity that organizations don’t know about, which collectively can deliver a full audit trail.
Make PAM business and context-specific
It can be all too tempting for organizations to put their full trust in the PAM tool alone. But what they don’t realize is that the wider business use and value of PAM, and what should be onboarded into it, is intrinsically linked to whether or not there's a good strategy in place.
An organization-wide PAM strategy fosters greater engagement with security teams and practices. Teams across the business will turn to PAM to save admin time and streamline workloads, meaning that a holistic PAM solution can improve security and productivity at the same time. It also makes it easier to engage with external suppliers and third parties, as their access control can be automated by the PAM solution.
To extend PAM’s value beyond security priorities and into wider business objectives, security professionals need to ask themselves what the scope of a PAM strategy should be, and which areas across the business are most important. This also includes engaging the workforce in the value and importance of privileged access control, so that they are trained and empowered to use the solution properly (i.e. not look for workarounds).
Conclusion: Creating a PAM strategy that delivers on your goals
The key to PAM success is recognizing it as more than a plug-and-play technology: it is a business enabler that helps you achieve your top security priorities through strategic implementation and governance.
The lasting value of PAM, however, will come from establishing clear ownership, defining onboarding responsibilities, and configuring the solution to meet your organization's unique business requirements. Without this strategic foundation, even the most advanced PAM technology will fall short of delivering the automation efficiencies and compliance readiness that security teams need.
Addressing these considerations internally can be complex, but it’s an area where an expert service provider like Turnkey can give you an objective, organization-specific view. We can help you answer questions such as:
- What key objectives do you want your PAM solution to enable?
- How does it need to be configured to fulfil your requirements?
- How can your governance objectives be integrated into the wider strategy?
- How can feedback and reviews feed into a cycle of continuous improvement as your business evolves?
With our help, your organization can simultaneously enable smoother business operations, embrace automation, protect key data and systems, and improve compliance readiness. We can work with you end-to-end, from establishing objectives and requirements, through selecting solutions and tooling, to ensuring the right strategy and governance frameworks are in place. Contact our team now to find out more or to discuss your specifics.
