Skip to main content

💎 Privileged Access Management

IdentityPAM IT Compass - PAM

What is Privileged Access Management?​

Privileged Access Management (PAM) secures elevated privileges in IT environments to prevent unauthorized access to critical systems. Its importance stems from reducing cyber risks associated with admin accounts, which are prime targets for attackers. PAM enforces controls that limit damage from breaches, and ensures regulatory compliance. Without PAM, organizations face massive risks from credential theft, insider threats, and compliance failures. PAM enforces least privilege to shrink the attack surface and provides visibility for rapid threat response.

Why is it so important?​

  • Privileged accounts outnumber employees 3-4 times and span humans, apps, services, SSH keys, and DevOps secrets, exploding in hybrid/cloud/DevOps/IoT setups. Attackers target them in 80-100% of breaches for lateral movement, ransomware and data exfiltration.
  • PAM prevents this by vaulting credentials, rotating passwords automatically, and monitoring sessions, cutting breach scope, operational costs, and cyber insurance while meeting regulations.
  • PAM addresses human weaknesses (insiders or phished users) with just-in-time/just-enough access, MFA and behavioral analytics to spot anomalies like odd-hour logins
Consultancy and PAM
  1. Every consultant should work through a PAM on a customer environment. This is the only way to prevent credential leakage and know what the consultant did
  2. While named-accounts are the go-to approach, a lot of devices still have "general" accounts. These accounts should always be exposed through a PAM solution.
  3. Not only end-users are a target for this solution, also our own resellers delivering consultancy towards their endcustomers. This brings them accountability and control over the services delivered to their endcustomers

Positioning Overview​

  • Target enterprises with regulatory pressures and complex hybrid setups
  • 88% of SMBs lack PAM despite high breach risks
  • Cross-sell opportunities with IAM (JumpCloud - Onelogin)

Specifics​

Vaults​

  • Vaults act as secure, encrypted repositories for all privileged credentials, secrets, API keys, SSH keys and certificates, preventing storage in browsers or scripts.
  • Automated rotation changes passwords post-session, discovery scans networks/cloud for unmanaged accounts, and checkout/check-in workflows ensure temporary access only
  • Integration with SIEM/HPSM provides instant revocation during incidents, reducing exposure time from days to seconds

Just-in-time and Just-enough-access​

  • Just-in-time dynamically approves privileges for specific duration/task, auto-revoking to eliminate standing access, ideal for break-glass emergencies or scheduled maintenance
  • Just-enough-access scopes permissions granularly (e.g. read-only DB views), using policies like Role Based Access Control with risk-based approval workflows incorporating MFA and peer review
  • In cloud/DevOps, it handles ephemeral roles, preventing overprovisioning while supporting automation via APIs

Session monitoring​

  • Real-time recording captures video, keystrokes, and commands for full forensic playback, with live monitoring for anomaly detection like excessive data exfiltration or script injections.
  • Behavioral analytics baselines normal activity, alerting on deviations, and tamper-proof logs export to SIEM for compliance
  • Isolation prevents clipboard/file transfers, enforcing air-gapped sessions

Proxying Mechanisms​

  • Proxies broker connections without credential exposure, injecting rotated credentials server-side while monitoring/recording sessions
  • Bastion/proxy servers support RDP/SSH/SQL/VNC with no VPN, gatewaying traffic to block direct access and enable multi-cloud/on-prem uniformity