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In the previous blog, we discussed how the on-going pandemic situation has changed the global cybersecurity landscape. We will continue the discussion with how ARCON is helping organizations to stay secure in this ‘new normal’.
A] ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Almost two-thirds of global data breach incidents happen due to compromise of privileged accounts. The typical challenges that organizations face while managing privileged accounts in both on-prem and remote work conditions are inadequate monitoring of privileged sessions, no rotation or randomization of passwords, no password vaulting, no multi-factor authentication (MFA) of users, and no report on logs for IT audits.
ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a comprehensive solution that seamlessly manages, monitors and controls the activities of privileged users in an enterprise network. If we consider the general use cases of PAM today, especially in remote work conditions, most of the organizations are prioritizing password-less access on the target devices where the users can seamlessly connect with the VPNs (extensiveness of RDPs). But VPN-led approach is risky. It is prone to hacking, does not provide granular access control and Multi-factor authentication. On the other hand, ARCON | PAM has a complete set of Identity Governance tools that includes MFA, Session monitoring, command restrictions (granular control) capabilities, password vaulting including an application streaming server that streams only required data to end-user machines from target devices in an encrypted manner.
Moreover, organizations are getting extra-cautious over time management and manpower management. No organization would like to spend an army of employees to manage PAM solutions. ARCON | PAM, in this context, is user-friendly and safeguards enterprise OS, security devices, routing devices, telecom equipment, business applications, cloud applications, IT operational technologies, robotics, and IoT. It secures and automates password rotation policies of the privileged accounts of critical systems by offering a strong password vault and managing the overall PAM lifecycle with minimum manpower.
B] ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics (UBA)
The preamble of modern IT security has changed a lot in the last few months after remote work culture became the ‘new normal’. The global IT community now believes in ‘predicting risks’ rather than ‘preventing risks’. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) has transformed the way Information Security is analyzed today. It is a highly effective risk predictive & user behaviour analytics tool built for daily enterprise use cases in WFH conditions. The AI-ML component of ARCON | UBA understands the behavior pattern of the end-users round the clock and in case of any deviation from the baseline activities, flags to the administrator about a probable anomaly. For instance, if a user downloads approx. 10MB of data files every day but suddenly downloads gigabytes of files, UBA tool would consider it as an anomaly and alert the admin immediately.
Demand of ARCON | UBA solutions from SMEs are soaring every day and will keep on rising. Not just helping to implement secured access control, this tool ensures that the IT security team can monitor remote users in WFH conditions where chances of data misuse are high.
C] Secure Remote Access
IT security in remote work conditions has been a huge challenge altogether. Organizations from every industry worldwide are striving hard to ensure every remote access is seamlessly monitored in WFH conditions to ensure security. It necessitates the organizations’ IT security team to stay alert and aware of how the confidential information is handled by the users while working remotely. Otherwise, cybercriminals might exploit the situational (pandemic) vulnerabilities to cause data breach, data exfiltration, unauthorized access, password abuse etc.
ARCON | Secure Remote Access provides Single-sign-on (SSO) to securely access applications and data from remote work conditions. It supports several Identity protocols. SSO ensures that all important privileged credentials are not shared and compromised. Moreover, the tool offers privilege session management that monitors and records all the activities. Just-in-time privileges approach ensures that users are granted access strictly on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis.
D] Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
“To be or not to be” – the age-old soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes in our mind while discussing ‘Trust’ of IT users. This is a never-ending dilemma and its seriousness has increased too much in the post pandemic times. Global organizations are shifting their focus from typical perimeter-centric security towards advanced IDS (Intrusion Detection System) models. Hence Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) security model has been so discussed, desired and accepted as the whole world has cocooned itself at home.
ARCON | PAM solution helps organizations to build the foundation of ZTNA. Since assessment of trust is a continuous process and it is going to be never-ending in the WFH circumstances, ARCON sticks to the credo “we trust you, but we will continuously assess the trust”. As the ZTNA security model suggests, it is mandatory to have a unified data security policy for all applications and databases that are accessed by privileged accounts. ARCON | PAM solution seamlessly inspects all the tasks happening around privileged identities and ensures trustworthiness. Moreover, ARCON Zero Trust architecture ensures continuous adaptive risk assessment (establishing trust over IP address, devices, facial recognition, bio-metrics, geo-location, etc), secure segmentation of identities, and robust detection and incident response. All these components enable the IT security team to have a comprehensive visibility over segmented and dispersed Identities.
E] Endpoint Security
Compromise of the endpoint privileges has been proved to be one of the biggest sources of data theft worldwide. Almost 60% of the organizations fail to monitor their endpoints. Poor endpoint management not only leads to data theft but also creates ambiguity over access to business-critical applications. The situation in remote working conditions has turned worse.
In WFH scenarios, it is hardly feasible for the administrators to track whether the users are using unauthorized and unrecognized endpoints in the enterprise network. ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) bridges the security gap between unmanaged endpoints and IT administrators in an enterprise network. It grants endpoint access to the privileged users by segmenting them strictly on their roles, responsibilities and duration (granular control). The access right is revoked immediately after the task is accomplished and thus helps organizations to avoid unnecessary standing privileges. It is highly recommended in WFH conditions, especially during flexible working hours.
Conclusion
In a genre where inadequate cybersecurity measures have become a burning topic among the IT community, the recent ‘new normal’ conditions have accelerated the necessity for secure remote access. ARCON offers a stack of robust technologies to overcome these challenges.
