Privileged Identity Management

Today, many businesses invest a considerable amount of resources in the establishment of an infrastructure to protect the continuous operation and the compliance with statutory regulations. A typical IT environment consists of hundreds or thousands of servers, databases, and network devices, all of which are controlled and managed by means of identities with extensive rights. This includes accounts like root in Unix/Linux, administrator in Windows, Cisco Enable, Oracle system/systems, MS SQL SA, and SAPall. However, especially these superuser accounts are often neglected, session activities are difficult to track, and passwords are seldom or never changed.

In certain cases, these identities are needed, not only by the internal IT staff, but also by external partners. For this reason, the access details must be reliably protected by means of secure remote access and secure session initialisation. Very often, applications, scripts, and configuration files also contain passwords that are never changed and that are vulnerable to third-party access. This can pose substantial risks for the company.

Privileged Identity Management (PIM) solutions serve the secure management, automatic change, and monitoring of all activities related to privileged user accounts. Protect privileged user accounts and administration passwords for routers, servers, databases, workstations, and applications. Establish a central point to maximise your security, simplify updates, optimise the system maintenance, and comply with regulations and recommended security procedures for all types of privileged accounts.

Trust, security, and passwords 2011

Every year, Cyber-Ark conducts a survey on the subject of trust, security, and passwords. The survey results show that the IT department is where most snooping takes place (53%). This is followed by the management (9%) and the sales department (6%). Of the individuals surveyed, 44% admitted that they had already accessed information on a system that was not relevant to their role. Another 31% had used the admin password to get at information that was otherwise confidential or sensitive. The following survey results show that this potential danger is not taken seriously by all companies: only 59% of the privileged user accounts were monitored. Of these, 46% were able to get around these control mechanisms. More survey results >>