Sign up below to receive our weekly Newsletter:
The growing complexity of IT and the multitude of IAM (Identity Access Management) and cybersecurity tools make it hard to fight privileged account attacks effectively. As an industry leader in PAM, our partner Delinea is building a future in which you can understand, manage and defend your entire privileged attack surface from a single solution, for both traditional and emerging use cases.
We call this vision Extended PAM (or XPM™). We believe it is the only way for cybersecurity professionals to scale their operations and keep pace with the digital arms race against increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals.
Why does the industry need an extended PAM solution?
PAM principles (vaulting, just-in-time, just-enough privilege, session monitoring, privilege elevation and delegation, etc.) effectively protect organizations against data breaches and ransomware by minimizing the privileges available to accredited users and granting elevated privilege with just-in-time approval. These capabilities can prevent breaches and limit or eliminate lateral movement caused by stolen login credentials and insider threats. Organizations have used PAM for many years to control access for domain administrators and other privileged users.
But the paradigm has changed radically since the early days of PAM. PAM was created when the main concern was the administrator, who worked physically inside the network. The resources they had access to were largely server-focused, usually located in a data center.
But now, remote work, hybrid IT environments, new types of applications and “endpoints” keep expanding the privileged account attack surface. The number of human and machine identities, endpoints, infrastructure and applications has exploded. The decentralized way organizations build and manage applications increases the number of identities in play while making it harder for security to stay on top of organizational risk – with Shadow IT challenges caused by various groups bypassing security standards for the sake of agility. With more and more automation and interconnection, there is a growing risk of data exfiltration and lateral movement.
Meeting compliance standards and preventing costly data breaches and ransomware attacks requires identity and privileged access controls for all these use cases. Leading analysts recognize this evolution of PAM and have broadened their definition to include new use cases such as DevOps and SIEM capabilities.
The problem? Standalone cybersecurity solutions each solve part of the identity challenge, but without coordination or consistency. These disconnected security solutions create inconsistent policies that lead to risky security gaps.
Common security solutions that cause problems
Using multiple tools from different vendors can complicate security management by creating different interfaces and fragmented reporting. With several management and monitoring tools, users constantly switch from one screen to another, which not only wastes time but leads to human error. Siloed tools do not account for dependencies between IT systems and user behavior. The policies and risk models used by each tool are not aligned, making it impossible to measure risk and track progress. As a result, these disjointed tools do not provide an accurate view of your risks and can easily miss critical gaps in your privileged access strategy.
Without consistent and accurate data, it is no wonder that many leadership teams do not fully understand or appreciate the scope of privilege security. These conditions are untenable. They will not give you the information or capabilities needed to take immediate and effective action against cyberattacks. If the industry continues down this path, we believe more and more organizations will be hit by ransomware and a growing number of people will be unable to access the services they need.
It is time for a change. We believe that PAM capabilities addressing both traditional and emerging use cases should be served from a single, unified interface.
This holistic vision is Delinea’s Extended PAM (XPM™).
Extended PAM enables comprehensive identity and privileged access management across the entire attack surface
Extended PAM redefines PAM to treat all users as privileged users and to meet the needs of complex IT environments. It ensures scalability by treating identity as the common thread of authentication and applying policy-based authorization controls to follow “Zero Trust” and least-privilege best practices.
The Extended PAM vision is as follows:
- Prevent identity/credential theft by increasing visibility and discovery across all human and non-human identities
- Establish controls over all privileged access to restrict unnecessary lateral movement
- Limit privilege escalation by adapting access when and where needed with analytics-based policies
Source: Delinea
HTBS helps you secure your organization with the Zero Trust approach, which will allow you to protect and secure every element of your infrastructure while gaining global visibility of your attack surface.
Learn more about our solutions …