Security Essentials in Managed Service Environment

A rundown on webinar hosted by ARCON and KuppingerCole
With a mission of spreading information security awareness and educating global folk about the security risks involved in uncontrolled and unmonitored privileged activities and their remedies, ARCON has become a global thought leader in the IT risk-preventive technology space. We participate in the global events, showcase our technological prowess, deliver speeches in summits and round-table on the role and importance of Privileged Access Management in front of IT security pros whilst learning about the emerging IT security threats to upgrade our solutions to the next level. With this, we have moved a step ahead in our thought leadership campaign by conducting an exclusive webinar in association with KuppingerCole Analysts team on 2nd July, 2019. The Webinar had the subject of “Challenges for Managed Service Providers Offering Privileged Account Management as a Service”. The eminent speakers of the Webinar were:

• Mr. Martin Kuppinger, Principal Analyst, KuppingerCole Analysts AG
• Mr. Kai Budel, Solution Architect, Prianto
• Mr. Martin Scherrer, VP, Business Development, ARCON

What was the objective behind this webinar?
Organizations migrate IT operations to IaaS platforms such as Managed Services to ensure business continuity with less manpower and low cost. However, with several IT and Privileged users processing an enterprise’s confidential data, security challenge can be huge if there is a lack of control over people and policies to manage and monitor privileged accounts access.

Inadequate security measures to protect privileged accounts can pose high risks to an enterprise IT environment. Therefore, a comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) is imperative to mitigate third-party threats. This is considered as the core of any modern cybersecurity strategy. Organizations often face challenges to control and monitor the privileged activities due to a lack of time, budget and infrastructure.

This webinar focused on:

• The risks posed by insufficient Privileged Access Management (PAM)
• Things to be considered by organizations looking for PAMaaS

In the initial part of the Webinar, Martin Kuppinger, Principal Analyst at KuppingerCole, explained the importance of PAM for all types of environments with specific emphasis on the ones involving MSPs, and the risks that come with inadequately managed privileged accounts.

Martin explained why Privileged Access Management (PAM) should be there to build a robust security around IT infrastructure and for ensuring authorized access to target systems. He emphasized that a PAM helps in IaaS environment in the following ways:

• Risk Mitigation
• Compliance
• Cyber Attack Resilience
• Overall Security
• Split Responsibilities
• Workforce Enablement
• Avoiding Human Error

The discussion proceeded towards proper restriction based controls in elevation of the privileges which ensures that the users can do only what they are required to do and nothing more. And in order to ensure that restriction, Martin explained that there has to be the following rules:

• Defined responsibility of the user
• Specific Services and Control
• Prioritizing work and role
• Adequate assistance
• Granular level control
• Privileged Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM)

He emphasized that a complete PAM solution is a combination of features and not a single solution. Starting from password management to privileged sessions monitoring, the best privileged account management involves:

• Shared Account Password Management
• Privileged Session Management
• Application to Application Password Management
• Session Recording and Monitoring
• Controlled Privileged Elevation and Delegation Management
• Privileged User Behaviour Analytics
• Endpoint Privilege Management
• Privileged Access Governance

In the second part, Martin was joined by another speaker Kai Buedel, who is the Solution Architect at Prianto, ARCON’s regional partner from Germany. He gave a brief introduction of Prianto services and introduced ARCON, an ISV specialized on PAM software and explained the feature-set and solution design for PAM as a service. Kai covered both MSP and customers from security perspectives. In the process of explaining the importance of PAM solution, he emphasized on the fact that 75% of data breaches happening today are due to privileged account compromise. As a result, he highlighted that the customers expect a secure environment from an MSP providing the PAM as a service. He underscored the fact that MSPs trust ARCON PAM because the robust solution has a best-fit and highly-scalable architecture that can ensure secure access due to the following capabilities:

• Single-Sign-On
• Dual-Factor Authentication
• Password Vault
• Access Control
• Session Recording
• Secure Multi-Cloud
• Secure Multi-Site

In the times to come, stay-tuned because ARCON would be conducting more webinars that would focus on several relevant industry use cases and discuss how its risk-predictive technologies can mitigate security threats arising from malicious insiders and unauthorized IT users.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.