In 2020, needless to mention, IT security has faced a dreadful, apprehensive and uncertain future, thanks to the recent pandemic and extensive adoption of Work From Home (WFH) culture. To build a robust cyber resilience, organizations are toiling hard to cope with the newest emerging IT security threats. Apart from the existing threats like phishing, ransomware, Man-in-the-Middle attack, DDoS attack or even Zero-day threats, the major threat of data theft by compromising privileged accounts has topped the list. Almost 72% of organizations have agreed that the security of privileged accounts is their major area of concern while trying to protect their vast data assets from unauthorized and malicious users.

The sanctity of data security depends on the preparedness of organizations in areas of centralized policy, access control management, real-time monitoring of the users, robust password management and more. Hence, we are witnessing the fast-adoption of PAM.

However, deployment of an enterprise-class Privileged Access Management (PAM) is never an easy task. Enterprises struggle to effectively implement it because a modern-day enterprise’s IT environment is complex. PAM projects get stalled or are ineffectively implemented because there is often a wide mismatch between the IT infrastructure requirements and solution offerings. Sometimes product architecture is very complex. Deploying a PAM solution becomes a nightmare when it has too many moving parts or is compatible only with let’s say windows endpoints. Again, a solution’s inability to support cloud or hybrid environments hampers scaling-up of the IT infrastructure. Implementation becomes a headache if a solution fails to seamlessly integrate with disparate IT components. Moreover, inadequate documentation, a bad user interface, or a counterintuitive administrative experience makes a PAM project a failure.

Why should your organization invest in ARCON | PAM on priority?

Here is a quick rundown of the challenges that IT security teams face while deploying PAM in their network. Additionally, we will see why more than 300 global enterprises prefer ARCON | PAM to ensure comprehensive security for their business assets.

• Lucidity in accessing servers and speed: This is one of the common challenges that organizations face while deploying PAM solutions. There are many global players, who have shown discomfort about slow server access during and post-deployment of PAM. However, for ARCON | PAM, we come across opinions like, “We can access the servers very fast and time saving tools..the product is good and user friendly… we are daily using daily reboot activity around 300 servers...”
• Scalability: This is another constraint for organizations while deploying PAM or renewing contracts of deployment. While scaling up the product services or features, very often organizations face an unwanted set back in terms of promptness and user-friendliness. ARCON | PAM, on the other hand, is serving the mid-size and large enterprises with a highly scalable architecture whenever required. The AVP – IT of one of our clients from the Finance industry opines, “Any kind of addition in the privileged accounts or any kind of scalability whenever required, ARCON team was prompt in action and resolved the queries and requirements in minimum time.”

• Smooth Implementation, Execution and Support: The IT department of any organization is always skeptical about incorporating new technologies in their daily operations. The drastic changes in the pattern of IT threats are forcing them to seek the assistance from a robust solution that could notify the administrators about any anomaly in real-time. PAM solution is the best contender for this. However, the IT administration department spends sleepless nights when it comes to implementing a new solution for their IT ecosystem. However, a smooth implementation might not be a reality considering if the support system is bad. ARCON | PAM in this respect has won confidence from many IT professionals as we see here: “ARCON is providing fantastic support during implementation phase. Along with excellent solution design that integrates with our business requirement it helps for business growth as well. The team is very skilled and helpful”.

• Customizability and Flexibility: This is another important factor which many large and mid-scale organizations look forward earnestly. On multiple occasions, it is observed that organizations prefer to customize the security solutions and services to perfectly fit into their ‘exact requirement’. While many vendors stumble upon this requirement, ARCON | PAM is a solution that is capable enough to mould the technology and features as per the ‘requirement’ and make the clients realize their value for money. One of the IT security managers from the Finance industry said, “We are using ARCOS from more than 4 years and have always seen terrific support from their back-end team in case of any customization or enhancement.” 

• Enhance Productivity, Performance and Compliance: This is the ultimate objective of any organization while implementing information security solutions in their IT infrastructure. ARCON | PAM never allows any kind interruption in the overall IT performance and always tries to enhance productivity with the benefits that are offered along with the solution. With this, the organizations are even able to comply with the standard global regulations. Even the analyst community speaks loud about this solution: “ARCOS Privileged Access Management Suite is very easy to manage and control on the access for IT Team, which helps for the Compliance in the Industry.”

Lastly, we would like to address that ARCON scored 3.45/ 5 for Mid-size and large enterprise use cases in Gartner 2020 report on Critical Capabilities for Privileged Access Management (PAM). Some of the key advantages of this solution are as below: (extract from the report)

• ARCON offers above-average privilege task automation (PTA) functionality through its automation script manager component.
• Discovery capabilities are above average, including AD, network devices, cloud, databases and some applications.
• It supports high availability and load balancing approaches with its appliances and software.
• It offers an encrypted email approach for a “break-glass” capability.
• Application allow/ deny/ isolate approaches are available, as is file integrity monitoring.
• ARCON offers smart session management, which flags access to high-risk systems, and good governance and administration through its user governance portal.
• Password management for both interactive and software accounts is supported by the ARCON vault.
• The logging and reporting capability is average to above average, with 90 reports out of the box.
• ARCON offers well above average performance for session management.
• In addition, ARCON offers a native identity analytics product called Knight Analytics, for UBA capabilities applied to PAM sessions

Disclaimer: Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Privileged Access Management, 4 August 2020, Michael Kelley, Felix Gaehtgens, Abhyuday Data
Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.