Privileged Access Management (PAM) Solutions

Privileged access management (PAM) tools are used to help organizations manage and secure accounts that have access to critical data and operations. Privileged identities can be human (employees or third parties) or silicon (e.g. “bots,” applications, or service accounts).

A human-privileged user is typically an IT admin with elevated rights (access) to make material changes to infrastructures, systems, or processes. Non-human privileged accounts have the ability to execute applications, run workloads, or perform other automated services. These privileged identity roles are typically granted with elevated credentials that enable access to sensitive data and resources. This makes it necessary to scrutinize these users’ activity and make sure their access is in accordance with the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP): users should only be given the necessary access to perform their job.

The PAM solution provides a centralized, secure platform to manage privileged accounts and monitor privileged activity.

A PAM security tool should include the following capabilities:

Discovery of privileged workloads, accounts and entitlements across infrastructure, clouds and applications in real time. This helps make sure privileged access is appropriately managed, reducing the risk of misuse.

Credential management for privileged accounts. The system should include a vault to store and obscure privileged account passwords. A PAM vault should also offer the ability to rotate credentials manually or automatically, as required by the organization. To increase your odds of success, it’s best to start off with a policy of using strong passwords.

Privileged session management, which provides the ability to establish and monitor privileged sessions. Tools should allow administrators to monitor privileged user activity in real time and enable them to remediate risks by blocking risky activity or terminating the session to mitigate a potential threat. Privileged session recording is an important function for compliance purposes and can be used for digital forensics if a breach occurs.

Intelligence and analytics provides dashboards and reporting for administrators to view privileged accounts and entitlements, understand the attack surface, review access logs and privileged user activity. It provides security analysts with insights into usage patterns to preempt or mitigate breaches and gives certifiers insight as to whether users have appropriate access and permissions.

Enabling Just-in-time privileged access is perhaps the most critical capability to pursuing a zero standing privilege (ZSP) approach. ZSP is a PAM access management strategy that allows organizations to reduce the attack surface associated with standing privileges. PAM tools should make it easier for administrators to provide privileged access to users for only enough time to complete the task with the least possible privilege given, thus giving attackers a smaller window to act.

Finally, a privileged access management solution should offer role-based access control (RBAC). By establishing role-based elevation of privileged access, you can eradicate standing privilege and move towards an ephemeral privilege or ZSP model.

While both PAM and IGA deal with access controls, they cover different domains.

PAM is mostly concerned with access management of privileged accounts. Since they’re considered high-risk, PAM typically involves more control and monitoring. For instance, privileged access management includes an audit trail and real-time monitoring to ensure accountability of a privileged identity.

IGA, on the other hand, is broader and tackles access management for the entire organization. It handles digital identity, role-based access control, and data governance for all users. IGA is also concerned with providing temporary access to third parties.

Both IGA and PAM are critical parts of a company’s overall identity management strategy. They need to work in tandem to keep the entire network secure.