FCW: The Business of Federal Technology

The Problem with Privileged Access Management: data breaches have become commonplace, and despite significant investments in perimeter and endpoint security, breaches typically begin at the desktop and server layers of an organization’s IT infrastructure. From there, it spreads through the overabundance of privileged access rights to each system and other misconfigurations and vulnerabilities attackers exploit. The problem with traditional Privileged Access Management providers is that they focus on controlling access to accounts and their passwords, not on the activities the administrators need to perform. As a result, they provide a minimal reduction of an organization’s attack surface because the accounts still exist on the endpoint and can still be compromised.

This 60 min presentation lead by Martin Cannard, VP of Product Strategy - Privileged Access Management, reviews the gap that exists between Privileged Access Management and Privileged Activity Management, highlighting a task-based approach that provides administrators with the exact level of privileges needed, exactly when they’re needed, for only as long as they’re needed – and then returns the environment to a no access-by-default state immediately upon completion.