Things You Need To Know About Privileged Access Management (pam)

By Author: Neel Punatar
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The Privileged Access Management (PAM) comprises of cyber-security techniques and technologies for enforcing enhanced level ("privileged") access control and authorization through an IT ecosystem for users, profiles, processes, and systems. By dialing into the correct level of privileged access controls, PAM helps businesses encapsulate the attack surface of their enterprise and avoid, or at least minimize, the harm done by external attacks as well as insider failure or negligence.

While privilege management incorporates numerous techniques, one central goal is to enact the least privilege, defined as restricting access permissions for users, account holders, apps, systems, devices (such as IoT) and computing procedures to the bare minimum acceptable level required to perform routine, authorized activities.

Also, sometimes referred to as PAM (privileged account management), privileged access management is deemed by many researchers and technologists as one of the most critical security programs for cyber risk ...
... mitigation and high-security ROI achievement.

The privilege management area is widely recognized as coming under the more extensive 'Identity and Access Management' (IAM) context. PAM and IAM together help to ensure fined-grained access, accountability and traceability for all credentials and permissions.

While IAM control systems provide identity authentication to ensure that the right user has the correct access at the right moment, PAM layers offer better visibility, regulation, and inspection over the privileged identification and activity.

What are privileges, and how are they formulated?

Under an information security context, privilege can be characterized as the authority within a computer system or network that a specific account or function has. Privilege offers authority to circumvent or bypass other security restrictions and can include approvals to perform activities such as shutdowns, loading computer drivers, network or server configuration, initializing and configuring accounts and cloud domains, etc. to name a few.

Privileges play a vital role in the context of an operational objective by allowing elevated rights for users, applications, and other system processes to access specific resources and accomplish assignments related to the work. Around the same time, the ability for insiders or outside threats to exploit or abuse privilege poses a daunting security risk to corporations.

Privileges are incorporated into OS, file systems, apps, repositories, hypervisors, cloud management tools, and so on for different user-profiles and procedures. In some cases, certain privileged users, such as a network or system admins, may also grant these rights.

Privileged Accounts

A privileged account is deemed to be any account that allows access and permissions above those of non-privileged profiles under a Privileged Access Management ecosystem. Any user utilizing exclusive access through a privileged account is called a privileged user. Due to their higher capabilities and access permissions, privileged users/ privileged profiles are at significantly higher risk of misuse or abuse than their non-privileged counterparts.

Consequently, the best practices through Privileged Access Management is to use these admin profiles only when absolutely needed, and for the shortest duration possible.

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