Protect your critical IT assets
Protect your most valuable IT infrastructure and assets with Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Privileged Accounts – the servers, devices, infrastructure housing your vital assets, and managed by your system and network administrators – are increasingly the no. 1 source of security breaches. Internal and external. Intentional and unintentional. Privileged Access gives you control: the right access to the right accounts by the right people at the right times.
admin accounts
Too many devices, too many admin accounts. It’s impossible to keep control. Privileged Access Management prevents risk-taking and bad habits.
third-parties
For effective collaboration, partners and suppliers need access to internal systems. PAM lets them do their work without introducing more risk.
audit
Every IT team has to comply with corporate or regulatory standards. Osirium PAM enforces standards and makes audits easy.
operations
IT teams manage hundreds or thousands of devices and systems. Managing account credentials and getting quick access to systems is a PAM super-power!
Every organisation depends on working with partners and suppliers. For effective collaboration, they often need access to devices and services but, do you have full control and visibility of what they’re doing?
Like preventing them from sharing privileged credentials with others? Ensuring they have access just to the accounts they need – and no more? Deleting credentials when they leave? And if outsourcing IT, controlling what happens when your outsourcers outsource?
All of these mean a mounting potential for major security breaches.
You may have hundreds or thousands of devices and administrator accounts with tens or hundreds of people that need access. Maintaining visibility and control rapidly becomes a real challenge.
And it leads to bad security practices. Passwords written on post-it notes. Unapproved password sharing. Predictable passwords that are easy to hack.
No audit trails of account access and activity. A security breach waiting to happen.
You wouldn’t think it safe to give a trainee pilot the controls of a jetliner. So why do so many organisations have inexperienced admins or junior help desk staff accessing complex, business-critical privileged accounts?
Maybe there aren’t enough specialist skills in place. But giving access to staff who may be under-skilled, over-privileged and under-resourced leaves you wide open to both malicious attacks and inadvertent errors
If credential theft is at the centre of so many security breaches, then don’t expose credentials. With Osirium PAM, we use the model of mapping identities of people to roles on the systems and devices that need to be administered.
Identity in, role out, with access granted to just the accounts they’re authorised for, and no credentials revealed.
Who, what, when, where. Osirium PAM delivers comprehensive audit trails and session recording, allowing for training and incident investigation as well as demonstrating rigorous compliance.
Privileged Access is not just about protecting login credentials. With Osirium, it's also about automating tasks that normally need an administrator.
By automating both routine tasks (‘Start server’, Stop server’, Refresh password’) and complex IT processes, Osirium cuts back manual effort, cost and risk, frees up valuable resources, and reduces the overall attack surface.
Read this high-level overview to see how PAM can protect your shared devices and services, manage privileged users and accounts and simplify remote access.
Find out more about Osirium PAM advanced capabilities
The heart of any PAM solution is a secure vault to protect valuable administrator credentials. It goes beyond password or credential vaults and identity management to control which users have access to which privileged accounts on which systems.
Moving beyond protecting privileged accounts is to protect privileged activities - what users are doing with those accounts. Wrapping tasks with automation prevents users performing changes they shouldn't and ensures policy or regulatory compliance.
The ultimate audit trail is a session recording that captures screen and keyboard actions in real-time. This can be used for auditing, monitoring third-party access or investigation after a security breach.
Having PAM as the centralised access point for all privileged access and accounts provides rich data that is used to spot unusual and potentially risky access. Behavioural analytics maybe your first indicator of compromise.
Increasingly, organisations are moving IT systems to the cloud. Osirium PAM is available on both the Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplaces.
In most cases, admins only need access to a specific tool to perform their work. Rather than granting access to the whole system, MAP Server present just the application they need and no more.
There are four key pillars to a successful PAM project. Read this complimentary Gartner report to learn how to make the most of PAM.
Selected PAM resources. Visit the Resource Centre for more information.
Privileged Access Management or PAM is a solution for managing powerful administrator accounts on applications, databases, services and devices.
Management of those privileged accounts includes credential life-cycle management including generating passwords, regularly updating credentials, and removing accounts when no longer needed. PAM provides a secure vault for those credentials and a central command and control point so that policies can be enforced and audit trails maintained.
Modern PAM solutions such as Osirium PAM take this further to include real-time session recording and management, automation and analytics.
Identity Access Management (IAM) or Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) are solutions for managing users proving who they are. This might include username/password combinations, biometric authentication or multi-factor authentication.
It’s essentially about “who you are”. Privileged Access Management (PAM) controls what the users do while connected to services and devices. The combination is very powerful, IAM tools authenticate the person then Osirium PAM manages the sessions for that user.
Privileged Access works by sitting between the user and the required service or device. Once the user proves who they are, Osirium PAM presents a list of devices, services and tasks that a person is allowed to access.
Once the required service is selected, PAM connects to the service and injects the administrator credentials to establish the user’s session. At no time are those credentials returned to the user ensuring they cannot be intercepted or leaked.
Osirium PAM supports a broad range of connection types including SSH terminal sessions, full remote desktop sessions and access to specific applications but not the full desktop.
Privileged accounts are those with enhanced capabilities, so Privileged Access Management could also be called Privileged Account Management but "access" is important because it covers what a user does while connected to a system, application or device as an administrator. For example, an administrator account may be able to create new accounts, update critical configurations, change system settings or access confidential data.
These accounts can be across the business, not just in IT. For example, Marketing may have an administrator account for their marketing automation system or access to a customer database.
The Finance team may have administrator accounts for accounting systems. Because of this power, administrator accounts are highly valued by cyber attackers as they unlock the most valuable systems and data.
The primary benefit of PAM is to protect valuable administrator credentials. Having this control and being able to prove it to auditors is a requirement not just for good business management but also for compliance with regulatory standards such as PCI DSS, NIST-800, Sarbanes Oxley, Cyber Essentials and many more standards. PAM is a critical capability that goes beyond Identity Management and Governance (sometimes known as IGA or Privileged Identity Management, PIM) as it's concern not just with the account credentials but what users do with those accounts.
Modern PAM is also an enabler for digital business by making it easier and faster for users to access IT systems, automating complex operations and securely allowing access for external partners and vendors.
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