With the right privileged access management policies, a cloud environment certainly can be secure.
Now a range of tools, features, and functionality exists across various products to effectively manage privileged access and achieve endpoint privilege management across these complex, distributed environments.
This requires more focus on local device access management rather than domain-related PAM. This is one of the hardest things about cloud PAM - if you have 200 or 2000 devices, then each of these has to be managed individually.
Each new software, workflow, or system comes with its own set of identities and privileged administrative access, all of which need to be carefully managed.
Traditional PAM solutions work by restricting access to sensitive assets and data to only those people who absolutely need it.
Just-in-time adds an extra layer of defense to this: offering access to privileged accounts only when they need it.
Instead, just-in-time access seeks to replace this with dynamic, conditional, and temporary access.
This requires privileged users to have a specific reason to access sensitive data.
All this limits the potential damage that hackers can do if they manage to gain access to a privileged account.
The main benefit here is obvious: it limits the damage a hacker can do even if they access a privileged account.
By identifying all the privileged user and service accounts that exist within an IT environment, we can enforce least privilege by removing any unnecessary access.
Role-based access Effective identity management is about having a predefined list of roles and privileges, so you know when you hire someone or change roles it's clear what privileges they should be assigned.
Role-based access lets IT teams create automated policies so these privileges are withdrawn once the user's job title changes.
Here's the issue - if a hacker gets access to privileged passwords, there's traditionally very little stopping them from wreaking havoc in your IT environment.
Increasingly, the gold standard of cloud PAM is to avoid end users having access to the password at all.
That's why it's so important to make sure you're getting access to modern, cloud-based PAM solutions like Heimdal®'s Privileged Access Management tool - so you can effectively implement the strongest possible defense.
Cloud privileged access management refers to any tools or policies specifically designed to manage elevated permissions in cloud environments.
These will generally feature more granular privileged access controls to manage rights on local devices, as well as automation, automated discovery, continuous monitoring, and password encryption.
The most important cloud PAM features to watch out for are continuous monitoring, automated discovery, privileged session management, just-in-time access, role-based access, and password encryption.
PAM for the cloud refers to traditional privileged access management tools adapted for cloud environments, securing access to critical assets.
This Cyber News was published on heimdalsecurity.com. Publication date: Tue, 06 Feb 2024 16:13:03 +0000