Privileged Access Management (PAM) plays a key role in building a strong security strategy. PAM allows you to significantly reduce cybersecurity risks, gain tighter control over privileged access, achieve regulatory compliance, and reduce the burden on your IT team.
As a known supplier a The PAM solutionwe have witnessed firsthand how PAM is transforming organizational security. In this article, we aim to show you how PAM can protect your company in real and effective ways.
1. Implementation of the principle of least privilege
Giving users sufficient access to perform their duties is fundamental to maintaining robust security. PAM solutions allow you to give employees the minimum permissions they need to do their jobs, helping you prevent privilege abuse and potential security incidents. For example, with PAM, you can securely provide access to confidential payment systems exclusively for your finance department.
If you force principle of least privilege at this granular level, you reduce the chance that attackers use excessive permissions to gain unauthorized access to your critical systems.
2. Implement a just-in-time (JIT) approach to access management
By granting access permissions on demand and dynamically revoking them, you can significantly reduce the attack surface. With a PAM solution, you can automate everything JIT PAM process – setting up access requests, approvals, and time-limited permissions.
For example, if software engineers need access to a production environment to troubleshoot a problem, PAM solutions allow you to grant temporary access and automatically revoke it once the problem is resolved. In this way, you minimize the risk of privilege abuse that will continue long after the task is completed.
3. Providing access to third-party providers
Security does not only extend to internal employees, as collaboration with third parties also creates vulnerabilities. PAM solutions allow you to give vendors time-limited, task-specific access to your systems and monitor their activity in real-time. With PAM, you can also immediately revoke third-party access after a project is complete, ensuring that no inactive accounts are left unattended.
Let’s say you hire third-party administrators to manage your database. In this case, PAM allows you to restrict their access on a need-to-know basis, track their activities on your systems, and automatically deny them access once they’ve completed a task.
4. Monitoring the activities of privileged users
Visibility is key to preventing external and internal threats. By monitoring privileged users, you can detect suspicious activity in a timely manner, stopping potential security incidents before they occur. Such solutions are PAM Syteca offer real-time monitoring of privileged user activity, enabling unusual behavior to be detected and resolved instantly.
PAM solutions with user activity monitoring capabilities allow you to record, mark and replay every action of privileged users. By capturing and viewing privileged sessions, you can quickly respond to incidents, identify root causes, and conduct thorough investigations to build a more resilient security system.
5. Automation of password management and rotation
Reused or weak passwords are an easy target for attackers. Relying on manual password management adds another layer of risk as it is both tedious and prone to human error. This is where PAM solutions with password management capabilities can make a difference. These solutions can help you protect passwords throughout their lifecycle — from creation and storage to automatic change.
By handling credentials with such PAM solutions and setting permissions according to user roles, you can ensure that all passwords are accessible only to authorized users. Additionally, with the real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities of some PAM systems, you can detect suspicious access attempts and stop brute force attacks or other credential-based threats.
6. Provision of remote access
For organizations that practice remote and hybrid work models, PAM provides critical security by ensuring secure and controlled access to privileged accounts. Deploying a PAM solution can help you enforce strict access policies, verify user identities with multi-factor authentication (MFA), and ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive systems.
In addition, some PAM solutions can log and record each remote session in real time. This level of control and visibility can help you ensure that your sensitive systems remain protected even when accessed from outside your corporate network, from a variety of remote locations.
7. Protection of cloud environments
Cloud environments pose unique security challenges due to their complex structure and limited visibility compared to on-premise systems. As organizations continue to move to hybrid or fully cloud installations, managing privileged access in these environments becomes critical.
With a PAM solution, you can restrict access to your cloud environment to only authenticated users, thereby reducing the chance of unauthorized access. What’s more, PAM’s robust logging and monitoring capabilities allow you to maintain a clear audit trail of who accessed what, when, and from where.
8. Incident Response Support
When a security incident occurs, every second counts, and prompt response can be critical to limiting potential damage. PAM can help you by quickly identifying which accounts have been accessed and isolating them quickly.
What’s more, PAM solutions often integrate with security information and event management (SIEM) systems, further enhancing your incident response. By loading data from your PAM solution directly into SIEM, you centralize all security information in one place. This can be particularly useful for correlating privilege-related activity with other security events on your network and promptly implementing targeted, effective measures.
9. Reduction of insider threats
PAM helps reduce insider threats by protecting all privileged accounts throughout their lifecycle. For example, PAM solutions with account discovery capabilities allow you to automatically discover any new unmanaged privileged accounts and integrate them into your system, where you can further protect them with mandatory MFA, session logging, and regular password changes.
Additionally, you can restrict who can access, manage, or modify privileged account credentials. For example, you can specify that only your senior IT administrators have permission to change or view account credentials.
10. Regulation of compliance with cyber security
PAM not only strengthens your ability to prevent, detect and respond to security incidents, but also supports your compliance efforts. From GDPR to NIS2, various cybersecurity laws, standards and regulations require organizations to restrict access to sensitive systems and data to only authorized users and to control accounts with elevated permissions.
PAM solutions often provide comprehensive audit trails of privileged user activity, helping you streamline your auditing process. Privileged access records can also help you ensure compliance with internal governance policies by providing clear evidence that privileged accounts are managed responsibly and securely.
Ultimately, PAM plays an important role in building a strong cybersecurity foundation. The Syteca PAM the solution gives you the ability to control privileged access in your IT environment. Syteca can help you implement granular access control, monitor privileged users, generate comprehensive reports on user activity, and receive real-time alerts on suspicious user behavior and respond quickly to potential threats. Designed with adaptability in mind, Syteca supports multiple platforms and easily integrates with existing IT infrastructure.
About the author: Ani Khachatran, CTO of Syteca, started her journey at Syteca as a test manager. In this role, she successfully modernized testing processes and helped integrate development best practices across the company. Her extensive testing experience and commitment to excellence help Anya find unconventional solutions to technical and operational challenges, and her deep expertise in cybersecurity makes her an expert in the field.
