Privileged Access Management: A Key Factor for the Modern Cloud Environment
The world has digitally transformed in many ways for businesses and individuals. Due to COVID-19, most enterprise workloads run in cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offering. This, as a result, is creating an entirely new set of security challenges to manage access to your organization’s infrastructure across multiple cloud platforms. But, with privileged access management, you do not need to worry! It acts as a gatekeeper managing access to admins and security software across your network.
Let’s explore Privileged Access Management (PAM) in detail-
What is Privileged Access?
In an enterprise environment, “privileged access” is a term used to define special access or abilities above and beyond a standard user. PAM is a comprehensive solution– involving people, processes, and technology — to control, secure, and audit all privileged identities and actions across a business IT environment.
At present, the privilege-related attack surface is rising. PAM, designed for the cloud, allows users to control what users can see and do in cloud platforms, services, and applications to strengthen their attack surface and address the cloud security challenges.
According to Gartner’s research, about three-quarters of failures regarding security incidents in the cloud will account for mismanaged privileges, identities, and access by 2023.
Security concerns are still the top barrier to cloud adoption, but organizations have been leading their way in the right approach, i.e., privileged access management.
Best Practices of PAM
Protect DevOps Secrets: Secure all Public Cloud privileged accounts, keys, and API keys. Place all credentials and secrets used by CI/CD tools in a secure vault.
Secure SaaS Admins and Business Users: Isolate all access to shared IDs and involve a multi-factor authentication process.
Protect Credentials for Third-party Applications: Vault all privileged accounts used by third-party applications and eliminate hardcoded credentials for commercial off-the-shelf applications.
Integration to IAM solutions: PAM solutions have integration ability with an organization’s identity and access management (IAM) system. This way, closing the security gaps and removing redundant processes for privileged and non-privileged accounts become easier.
As we dive deeper into 2021 and continue to remote work, organizations are beginning to understand the need to secure their cloud environments. You can proceed by auditing and vaulting all your cloud privileges; check if their permissions match your access policy and their role. Consider a least-privilege approach, so users get access to the areas only related to their role.
Want to know more about PAM cloud solutions and their offerings? Connect with our cloud experts now.
