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Overview
Being the flagship product of ARCON, Privileged Access Management (PAM) is evolving continuously in terms of new features and functionalities. Recently ARCON | PAM has introduced ServiceNow feature that allows the administrators to raise and track IT service requests. It is a new step to build credential vault (either internal or external) for the JAR files.
The Use Case
In a distributed IT environment, organizations take the help of JAR files which is a package file used to aggregate many JAVA class files and associated metadata and resources into one file for smooth distribution. These files do not target a specific hardware platform but target the Java virtual machine architecture. The Management, Instrumentation and Discovery (MID) Server or the JAVA application that runs on the UNIX/ LINUX server in the internal/ local network requires a set up that can define, manage, and automate IT services for the organization.
Now, in a typical IT environment, where every end-user access is monitored seamlessly by a robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, the JAR files are no exception. To avoid credential abuse in privileged access environments, the credentials for accessing critical files need strict authentication before allowing access.
What does ServiceNow do?
Adding ServiceNow to PAM helps IT administrators to keep track of the interactions or activities between PAM and the end-users. Once the integration is configured, the ServiceNow incident number is added to the access request form and the rest of the authentication process is automated. With this ServiceNow credential vault, the organizations
- Need not create any separate credential vault to secure information assets.
- Can get a complete overview of the access reason and pattern
- Can easily define ServiceNow Username and Password for frictionless login
- Can ensure double authentication of the access credentials
- Can easily configure approvals for catalog items for better governance
- To fulfill faster configuration, authentication, and access to critical data repositories
- To centralize administrative and service desk workflows
- To ensure audits and compliance checks whenever required
ServiceNow uses MID Server deployed inside customer network to perform agent-less discovery of their infrastructure. ServiceNow has its own credential vault and can also use external credential vault. ARCON Credential Resolver is uploaded on ServiceNow platform which is later available on the MID Server. ARCON Credential Resolver speaks with the ARCON Vault API depending on the configurations. Once the ServiceNow platform tries to resolve the credential for any server present in the infra, ARCON credential resolver will fetch the details from the Vault and pass it to the ServiceNow Platform to authenticate the credentials.
Conclusion
With the growing complexities and challenges of managing privileged credentials, the introduction of ServiceNow credential vaulting can simplify password management and at the same time strengthen user authentication and access control infrastructure. Indirectly, it provides validation prior to authentication on the target servers and protects the privileged sessions by offering an additional security layer in the IT infrastructure.
