Three Reasons Privileged Access Management is Important for any Organisation

For most organisations, it can be challenging to find the right aspects of cybersecurity to prioritise. Usually, they don’t have enough resources to deal with emerging threats from a personnel and budget standpoint. When you work to prioritise cybersecurity projects and programs, you must consider how security can be a business enabler for your company. Security leaders must help drive the conversation with the business on the value of applying reliable cybersecurity to modern technologies to mitigate the risk, maintain a strong security posture, and improve operational efficiencies.

Below are the reasons privileged account management and access management is essential:

Privilege Access is the Gateway to the Valuable Assets of your Company

With more users, applications, and devices than before in organisations that embrace digital transformation, a lot of security departments are finding it difficult to maintain visibility across their privileged accounts and credentials on-premise, in DevOps environments, or in the cloud. But, privileged access is usually the last line of defense of an organisation so it has to be the strongest. Organisations must prioritise the security of their privileged access pathway.

Prevent Attackers Looking for Human Flaws

Humans can easily make mistakes by clicking on a phishing email link or attachment or download malicious code on their machine. Also, people tend to be lax in terms of strictly adhering to security best practices. This is especially possible it affects their productivity. Indeed, some employees will want to take shortcuts to connect to sensitive applications, systems, and data when there is a chance. Unfortunately, cyber attackers want to take advantage of these flaws and target a company’s console and gain access to the most critical business applications immediately. Privilege access management (PAM) can help prevent this.

There are Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities within an organisation such as service accounts, vulnerability scanners, and enterprise IT ticketing systems must be discovered, managed, and secured. While the organisation extends its digital transformation techniques to include things such as robotic process automation (RPA), hundreds or thousands of new non-human identities are introduced that require privileged access. Also, this increases the opportunities attackers have to breach company data.

Companies must implement a comprehensive privileged access security program that let them effectively monitor where privileged access exits at each layer and understand the users with access to what. Also, the program should be able to let companies detect and alert on a high-risk and malicious activity as well as improve overall cybersecurity. Managing non-human identities is becoming more important as companies adopt Zero Trust frameworks.