What are PAM Solutions?
PAM tools help organizations provide secure privileged access to critical assets and meet compliance requirements by managing and monitoring privileged accounts and access.
PAM tools offer features that enable security and risk leaders to, for all use cases:
- Discover privileged accounts on systems, devices and applications for subsequent management.
- Automatically randomize, manage and vault passwords and other credentials for administrative, service and application accounts.
- Control access to privileged accounts, including shared and “break glass” (emergency access) accounts.
- Isolate, monitor, record and audit privileged access sessions, commands and actions.
Market Overview
A market analysis was carried out at one of Cyber Collective’s clients, a tier 2 financial institution. The client wanted a best in class privileged access management solution. Whilst Cyber Collective had previous exposure and experience of the CyberArk solution, which we successfully rolled out at a tier 1 Bank; the one size fits all was not in this case the best or most appropriate solution.
In order to satisfy the client’s needs a detailed analysis was carried out. This included, rating the following in order of priority:
- Automate Privileged Tasks.
- Best Practices for Privileged Access Management.
- Meet Audit and Compliance.
- Mitigate Risk with Just-in-Time and Least Privilege.
- Remove Local Admin Rights on Workstations.
- Secure Application Credentials.
- Secure Cloud Environments.
- Secure DevOps Pipelines and Cloud Native Apps.
Other key considerations included: the customer size, network reach, number of employees, applications used and most importantly budget.
Reference was made to the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for the latest up-to-date PAM providers. Gartner is one of the many resources considered to be an excellent source of the latest offerings and market leader comparisons.
Regular progress updates were provided to the client, ensuring questions along the way could be answered. Furthermore, over the course of this analysis, the customer requirements, exposure to the solution provider offerings during the product overviews would ensure that the decision-making process would be more efficient and reflective of any preferences.
The outcome – the recommendation was accepted by the customer.