Privileged Access Management — where privileged access is a term used to designate special access to select users or systems. It enables organizations to safeguard the confidentiality of sensitive data and protect critical infrastructure while securing infrastructure and applications. Access to servers, changing permissions, creating backdoor accounts, and changing or deleting data are all privileges granted to system and database administrators. Systems may need special accounts in order to execute batch jobs, schedule tasks, and run critical IT processes across a network of databases, applications, and file systems. Only a small handful of employees or partners who have the highest retrieve clearance have access to special accounts.
What Is PAM?
Privileged access management is used by organizations to defend against the risks posed by credential theft and privilege misuse. It is a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that combines people, procedures, and technology to secure, monitor, and control all special identities and activities throughout an enterprise IT environment.
It is also known as privileged identity management (PIM) or privileged access security (PAS), and is based on the idea that users should only have the minimal retrieve necessary to carry out their job duties. In order to secure special entry to highly valuable data and assets, it is essential to follow the principle of least privilege, which is widely regarded as a cybersecurity best practice. Organizations can restrict the attack surface and mitigate the risk from hostile insiders or foreign cyberattacks that could result in expensive data breaches by adopting the least privilege principle.
How Does It Function?
Privileged access management, by managing risk and security, protects your endpoints from cyber threats or intentional abuse of special accounts.
It provides a scalable and secure mechanism to permit and monitor all special accounts across your endpoints. It enables you to:
- Users should only be given authority to systems that they are allowed to use.
- Access should only be given when absolutely necessary, and it should be immediately terminated after use.
- Eliminate special users’ access to local or direct system credentials.
- Access control for several heterogeneous systems can be centrally managed.
- For all special operations, provide an unchangeable audit trail.
What is PASM?
PASM is privileged account session management. It together with privilege elevation, delegation management, secrets management, cloud infrastructure, and entitlement management, is one of the four fundamental parts of privileged access management.
Protecting special accounts and sessions is the main objective of PASM. This approach, in particular, helps in the security, control, recording, and auditing of all managed special account operations.
Comparison between Managed Privileged accounts and Managed privileged sessions
| Managed Privileged accounts | Managed privileged sessions |
| Access to privileged accounts can be granted and revoked. | Monitoring of the session in real-time. |
| Auditing and monitoring the actions of users with privileged access. | Screen recordings |
| Using a password vault to protect credentials. | Recording keystrokes |
| Frequently updating passwords for privileged accounts. | Session management |
Privileged access is the source of substantially all significant security breaches that give access to an organization’s most valuable assets. It allows both malicious insiders and motivated external attackers to gain access to network infrastructure and steal data. Outside third parties and vendors with privileged access are particularly juicy targets because they often use legacy access methods like tunneling that create unrestricted and unmonitored attack footholds on a network. Control and monitoring privileged access effectively is the comprehensive defensive strategy to safeguard the endpoints and protect the organization’s privileged credentials.
Privileged entry management is important for companies that are growing or have a large, complex IT system. Many popular vendors, such as BeyondTrust, and 3Columns have begun offering enterprise privileged access management (PAM) tools.
This video will offer insight into how to mitigate cybercrime risks and create a winning network protection strategy.
Why 3Columns?
3Columns is a young cyber security company with years of experience in providing cyber security solutions. We provide comprehensive cyber security services that cover your business requirements end to end. Our managed service is not only built on the best tools but also has in-depth knowledge and experience to provide you with the best security coverage for your service.
We complement our managed SIEM service with GRC, Penetration Testing, Incident Response and Management, and Professional service capability. We partner with Government agencies like ACSC and use the best threat intelligence to provide for our customers. This allows our customers to focus on growing their business rather than worry about cyber threats.
