PAM Challenges

Here are the most common challenges faced by many organizations today in relation to privileged accounts:

Nothing or All Access
Privileged accounts are all powerful. If someone has the password, they have the ability to do nearly anything they want.
Often Shared
They are often shared. Everyone that may need to perform administrative actions on the system would need the privileged account to do it.
Anonymous
They are anonymous being tied to systems and not individuals. There is no level of individual accountability associated with privileged accounts and the people that share them.
Lack Audit
often the ability to watch what an administrator is doing with a privileged account is difficult at best, and impossible at worst.
Necessity
IT staff, including contractors and vendors, must be able to access the systems they manage at a deep enough level to do their jobs. However, implementing a least privilege model is often too difficult whilst providing access to privileged users.
PAM Systems

All PAM systems are designed specifically to meet the complex and growing security and compliance requirements associated with privileged identity management and privileged access controls within the enterprise. The focus of the solution is to provide the enterprise a cost-effective modular platform from which they can enable various privilege control functions as required based on current and/or future privileged access control requirements. The proven approach is to vault sensitive credentials in a secure appliance where the issuance of these credentials can be controlled or restricted entirely. By using PAM as a session proxy, users can be signed on to end systems with privileges, without ever knowing the password.

Business Benefits:

  • Reduce risk imposed by misuse of privileged credentials and internal threats.
  • Better control of remote vendor and developer access to critical systems.
  • Secure issuance of credentials and enforcement of separation of duties.
  • Improved efficiency, security, and compliance.
  • Simple tracking and auditing for all privileged activities.

PAM solution offers two key functional areas for managing privileged access:

PASSWORD MANAGEMENT SESSION MANAGEMENT
  • Automates, controls and secures the process of granting privileged credentials with role-based access management and automated workflows
  • Enables companies to manage passwords from anywhere and using nearly any device
  • Enables companies to issue privileged access for a specific period - or session – to administrators, remote vendors and high-risk users
  • Provides full recording and replay capabilities
  • Serves as a proxy to ensure that your critical assets are protected from malicious software that might be lurking on an admin’s machine
  • Provides a single point of control to authorize connections, limit access to specific resources, view active connections, record all activity, receive an alert if connections exceed pre-set time limits and terminate connections
PAM Technical Features

Workflow engine
A workflow engine that supports time restrictions, reviewers, multiple approvers, emergency access and expiration of policy as well as reason codes input and integration with ticketing systems. Secure flexibility allows password requests to be approved automatically or require multiple levels of approvals depending on risk factors of the request and/or user.
Full-session audit, recording and replay
All session activity — every packet sent, and action taken, including mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes — is recorded and available for review. The time and content of the session are cryptographically signed for forensics and compliance purposes. To minimize offline storage requirements only actual activity is recorded, and recordings are compressed afterwards.
Always online
Distributed clustering is typically implemented to provide the Customer with true high availability. Load balancing capabilities of the cluster allow faster throughput and shorter response times by enabling passwords and sessions requests from any appliance.
Approval anywhere
An optional, often cloud-based, component to enable the management to approve or deny any request from anywhere without being on the VPN.
Discovery
Quick discovery of any privileged account or system on the company network with host-, directory and network-discovery options.
RESTful API
An API based on REST to connect with other applications and systems. Functions are exposed through the API to enable quick and easy integration regardless of what want to do or which language your applications are written.
Multi-language support
Localization is essential in privileged access management, most notably for Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.
Activity Center
Monitor and control all activity within the solution via a query builder. This component also enables custom reports for intended audience, such as IT operations or non-tech executives. Queries can be scheduled to optimize the load on the productive systems and the obtained data can be saved and exported in a variety of formats.
Two-factor authentication support
Protecting access to passwords with another password is not just enough. Requiring two-factor authentication to access PAM controls further enhances security. PAM systems typically support RADIUS-based 2FA solutions to ensure interoperability with the most services.
Why UDV?

Reach out to UDV Tech to discuss your unique case and requirements. We have completed multiple successful PAM projects with businesses of all industries and sizes and earned One Identity trust and customer respect for going above and beyond in every project we tackle.

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