What exactly is Privileged Access Management?

Privileged Access Management

If you work in the IT industry, you’ve probably already heard terms like “Privileged Access Management” (PAM) and “Privileged User Management”. But you didn’t say anything because you didn’t know exactly what it was all about.

Don’t worry, in this blog post you’ll learn everything you need to know about Privileged Access Management.

PAM according to the Gartner

According to the Gartner, “Privileged Access Management” (PAM) solutions are designed to help organizations provide a secure and privileged access to critical assets and meet compliance requirements by managing and monitoring privileged accounts and accesses.

Privileged users management solutions offer many features that allow IT security managers (CIOs, CISOs) and risk managers (SEOs, QSE):

– To identify and track privileged accounts on systems, devices and applications for later management.

– To automatically randomize, manage and store in a vault, passwords and other credentials of administration, service and application accounts.

– To control access to privileged accounts, including shared and “emergency access” accounts.

– To isolate, monitor, record (activity logs or video records) and check sessions, commands, and actions from privileged access.

Systancia Cleanroom, the only virtual administration workstation, sterile and disposable

A PAM solution is generally seen as an bastion host for managing and monitoring privileged accounts (internal and/or external). However, the ANSSI (National Cybersecurity Agency of France) points out in its recommendations on the secure administration of information systems that a bastion host solution “obviously does not replace […] partitioning the administration IS and securing the administration workstation”.

Thus, Systancia Cleanroom is the only Privileged Access Management (PAM) product allowing IS administrators to access a sterile, disposable workstation for administering all resources, whether on-premise or in the cloud. This product goes far beyond traditional bastion hosts: password vault, session recording, and traceability, administration of all types of resources, infrastructures and applications… This workstation is intermittent and secure, with workstation models per profile, and allows a hardened access workstation or the hardening of the access workstation.

To conclude, a Privileged Access Management solution allows:

  • To meet regulatory compliance requirements
  • To improve traceability and auditability
  • To facilitate staff rotation and reduce the risk of password leakage
  • To avoid post-audit trauma and data leakage