Choosing a Cloud Privileged Access Management (PAM) Solution?: Three Must-Ask Questions

Privileged Access Management is Now a Critical Security Control. Do You Know What To Look For?

In light of modern security challenges, privileged access management (PAM) has evolved from a compliance checkbox item to a critical security control. Whether your organization has never implemented PAM, or hasn’t bought a PAM solution since flip phones were a thing, you’re likely hunting for the right list of privileged access management-related questions to ask and concerns to raise en route to a modern, secure, and likely cloud-based PAM solution.  

Evaluating privileged access management solutions can be complicated. To help you assess PAM solutions for more modern use cases, turn to our Cloud PAM Buyers Guide. 

Check out our previous post for an overview of important cloud PAM characteristics. In this blog, we’ll share some privileged access management-related questions to ask prospective PAM vendors in your evaluation.

Q: What Business and Stakeholder Needs Should I Consider?

PAM projects touch multiple areas of the business. These projects may originate in security, but they impact IT users, auditors, and company leadership. Prior to inviting vendor pitches, sit down with your stakeholders to understand their needs and their dealbreakers. 

Consider:

• IT Admins likely understand the need to operate more securely, but might be resistant to any change that could be perceived as slowing them down.
• Audit teams need to have confidence that the new solution is removing – not creating manual work and that they have report options for multiple different stakeholders.
• Management needs to be able to justify cost vs. risk, so solutions must demonstrate high ROI and work to reduce TCO.

Awareness improves your odds of adoption and risk-reduction outcomes. Ask prospective vendors how they enable onboarding, automation, and ease of use to drive adoption of PAM tools and PAM program goals.

Q: How Will This PAM Solution Advance My Risk-Reduction Strategy?

No matter how many bells and whistles, the biggest success factors for identity security campaigns are quick value and usability.  Projects flop when issues like cumbersome management, operational complexity, and unintuitive user experiences persist. Friction equals value loss. So weigh features, capabilities, and interactions of each privileged access management tool accordingly. 

For enterprises to generate the immediate value they want, they must start with minimally disruptive solutions. This means both reducing complexity and achieving unity in otherwise fragmented identity and access management (IAM) tools. 

To evaluate ways to compress time to value, probe where complexity and waste are most pronounced. That would be areas like onboarding, user interface, and configuration vs. coding.

Q: How Can I Shorten Time to Value?

The outsized success factor for identity security campaigns is quick, obvious value. For enterprises to generate the immediate value they want, they must start with minimally disruptive solutions. This means both unity in otherwise fragmented tools (see above) and reducing complexity. As we always ask: Do you want to run your identity program or have it run you?

To evaluate ways to compress time to value, probe where complexity and waste are most pronounced. Examples include:

• User experience
• Architecture (cloud native or infrastructure-based)
• Ease of application onboarding
• Automation-driven 
• Discovery and analytics capabilities 

The job of identity security is to verify that the right users (both human and machines) take the right actions in the right apps at the right time. Friction equals value loss: So weigh features, capabilities, and interactions accordingly. 

Move off Legacy Infrastructure and Conquer Cloud Complexity

Saviynt Privileged Access Management built on our Identity Cloud, which converges IGA, granular application access, cloud security, and privileged access into the industry’s only enterprise-grade, SaaS-based identity solution. This converged approach means that customers can manage all identities and entitlements more efficiently to improve enterprise-wide visibility and leverage identity intelligence to make better access decisions.