Four Key Privileged Access Management Issues CISOs Must Address

Privileged Access Management
Four-Key-Privileged-Access-Management-Issues-CISOs-Must-Address

Numerous sectors express worry or dissatisfaction with their current Privileged Access Management (PAM) technology and procedures. Nevertheless, there seems to be a substantial misunderstanding of what PAM is, and many enterprises still rely on manual processes or non-PAM solutions.

Today’s threat landscape makes it inevitable that most attacks rely on or, in some manner, abuse Privileged Access Management (PAM). According to the 2019 Cyber Incident & Breach Trends Report, 95% of breaches might have been avoided, many of which come from the misuse or exploitation of privileged access.

An efficient cybersecurity approach to avoid compromise is limiting or eliminating privileged access to critical apps and data. Therefore, it is essential for businesses to employ a PAM solution.

Here is a list of some typical Privileged Access Management (PAM) challenges that businesses have to deal with.

Inability to produce owing to excessively limited privileges

The overuse of privileged access and overly restrictive privileges can significantly affect employee productivity. For instance, disruptive restrictions over who has access to what might aggravate employees since their workflow is hampered by limited access.

When personnel maintain credentials, they don’t need when their position within the firm changes, it poses another problem with privileged access.

Also Read: Privileged Access Management helps prevent the cyberattacks cycle

Lack of knowledge

A disaster might result from a lack of awareness about all users and how they are used in an organization’s IT system. Periodically, privilege accounts need to be found and consolidated. Business visibility and control over privileged access are essential from a security perspective. IT teams are unable to implement integrated administration of privileged accounts without the required tools.

Companies all across the world face significant financial and reputational risk when regulatory standards are not met. Keeping track of and tracking every privileged activity is a severe challenge for many organizations.

Control of the assets is necessary when a network is practically on-premises.

Businesses should consider implementing IAM and PAM initiatives in an on-premises system, along with the staffing needs and data center upgrade schedules that must be handled around competing IT projects.

The challenges of integrating offsite directory services with cloud-based ones are present in cloud subscription-based pricing. Hybrid configurations could need additional networking and firewall settings for the cloud.

Increased privileged access

Long-time IT professionals are aware of the annoyance involved in having to log into numerous accounts to carry out routine network or system maintenance chores. As a result, giving systems or network devices full, privileged access is frequent, allowing for speedy but shoddy access management.

Over time, this sometimes slow permissions creep can grant unrestricted access to the majority, if not all, network and system resources, creating a single point of vulnerability for the most valuable assets of an organization.

Also Read: The Need for an Integrated Cloud and On-Prem Security Strategy for Hybrid Networks

The temporary privileged access that a data owner grants to a role for a project or other duties is another rationale for privileged access extension. The increased access is made permanent since the temporary access was not properly handled.

Regular account inspections by security teams can spot permissions creep, but because they are challenging, they are frequently neglected or carried out sloppily. In addition, unnecessary access continues in between evaluations.

Security holes can result from decentralized credential management

Maintaining best practices in organizations with various departments might be challenging since credentials may be handled differently in each area. Scaling human privilege management across enterprises is challenging due to the fact that the majority of IT environments contain hundreds or even thousands of privileged accounts and credentials.

Employees may often reuse credentials across accounts due to the vast number of accounts, which causes vulnerabilities. For instance, employees who repeat their login credentials run the risk of having many accounts’ security compromised by only one hacked account.

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