Privileged access management is an essential tool of any modern cybersecurity strategy.
The Challenge of Effective Privileged Access Management Too often, security teams lack visibility over the privileged accounts they have.
Privileged access management involves controlling access to the most sensitive information and assets in your IT environment, in order to more effectively protect them.
Other privileged users might leave the company and retain access.
In each of these examples, the definition of privileged access was too narrow.
Step by Step: The Full Privileged Access Management Lifecycle The organizations that do PAM well don't think of it as a 'job to be done'.
While there's no single defined framework for managing privileged access, there are a series of broadly accepted best practices and principles.
The goal here is to shift privileged access management from being a 'one and done' task to being a more continuous and holistic approach.
Specialist privileged access management software is realistically the only way to achieve much of the advice we provide below.
The best place to start is to run a discovery scan of all existing privileged accounts.
Realistically, this isn't possible without a modern privileged access management solution.
Generally, this will involve a PAM audit using your specialist privileged access management system.
Now the scan is complete, you should apply least privilege and reduce any unnecessary access across the organization - including both user and service accounts.
Remove standing privileges, administrative access rights on end-user devices, and default all users to standard privileges.
Requiring relevant accounts to have complex privileged account passwords that are changed regularly.
Use modern tools to adopt dynamic, context-based access - known as privileged session management.
Effective privileged access security can't just be about monitoring the right metrics and revoking access regularly.
As we discovered earlier, privileged accounts can be compromised in several ways that only effective training can combat.
As we've discussed elsewhere in this blog, effective privileged access management is either very difficult or next to impossible without the right tools.
A privileged access management lifecycle refers to a culture and process of least privilege at every level of the organization.
This Cyber News was published on heimdalsecurity.com. Publication date: Tue, 16 Jan 2024 13:43:16 +0000