EC News DeskBeyondTrust is a global vendor in Privileged Access Management, empowering organisations to secure and manage their entire universe of privileges. The vendors integrated products and platform offer the industry advanced PAM solution, enabling organisations to quickly shrink their attack surface across traditional, cloud and hybrid environments.
The BeyondTrust Universal Privilege Management approach secures and protects privileges across passwords, endpoints, and access, giving organisations the visibility and control they need to reduce risk, achieve compliance, and boost operational performance.
For all of information technology’s benefits, most organisations are well acquainted with the by-product of rapid IT advances and expansion — increased cybersecurity risk. Indeed, growing cybersecurity concerns correlate directly with your organisation’s expanding digital universe and the number of people given some level of authority to operate within it.
A swiftly expanding digital perimeter — both physical and logical — inevitably makes organisations more vulnerable to the so-called cyberattack chain, regardless of how far the perimeter has extended. The attack process starts with a successful perimeter breach or insider malfeasance, followed by the theft of privileged user credentials, through either poor privilege security management or exploitation of a vulnerability.
With privileged user IDs and passwords in hand, an attacker can then move laterally throughout an organisation, seeking its most valuable digital resources.
The favorite question to ask a CISO is – are we compliant? At BeyondTrust we recognise that there is no turning back the clock when it comes to our expanding and increasingly complex digital footprint. It is time for organisations to get serious about placing their privileged accounts under tight control, regardless of their digital presence.
Highly regulated industries, such as banking and healthcare, are required to maintain a comprehensive audit trail of privileged user activity. Organisations must establish individual accountability for all privileged users and have the capability of reviewing privileged sessions according to its potential risk.
Many are even required to review a specific percentage of all privileged workloads, but manually identifying high-risk activity can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Strong privileged access controls enable security teams to predefine commands, actions and activities, create risk scores and easily pinpoint threats in a manner that dramatically simplifies audit and compliance requirements and saves time.
The adoption and understanding of cloud native technologies is vital to any organisation’s success. Lines of business are quickly adopting cloud and SaaS technologies, as well as making use of DevOps and IoT devices to drive business value. Without understanding this new environment that you need to defend, it can leave the door open for attackers.
As businesses continue their journey of transformation to operate in a digital capacity, the number of attack surfaces continues to exponentially grow. Without some level of discovery and automation, any cybersecurity product will struggle to deliver the protection necessary for the enterprise. It is vital that the tools empower the security team, and work at the velocity of the business.
Having a strong understanding of where privilege exists and how to manage secrets will be the key to success. It is also recommended to learn some basic programming skills – python, golang, and shell scripting. More and more services are becoming API driven and automated, so it will become a requirement for cybersecurity professionals.
