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Organizations adopt privileged access security practices with a well-defined framework as to people and policies to ensure restricted access to privileged accounts. Privileged accounts have elevated access to confidential information stored in systems and business-critical applications. Nevertheless, organizations make one huge mistake, very often… far too many standing privileges are created. This practice often leads to data breaches, abuse or misuse of business data because by giving excessive standing privileges, organizations are essentially ignoring the concept of the ‘least privilege’.
To mitigate the threat of excessive standing privileges — in addition to a rule and role-based granular control access policy, organizations must implement the practice of Just-in-time privileges (JIT), an essential component of of Privileged Access Management. It minimizes the threat vector in the network periphery.
Security Challenges arising out of excessive standing privileges
About 75% of data breach incidents start with privileged account abuse across the world, many studies suggest. The IT security teams agree to the fact that managing, monitoring and controlling privileged activities is always a challenging task especially in distributed data center environments. In addition, the fast adoption of advanced technologies like cloud infrastructure, virtualization, and migrating data to third-party environments have doubled the risk surface as the number of privileged accounts escalates significantly due to the changing scenario.
Organizations often end up offering too much liberty to privileged users through standing privileges that result in misuse or abuse of privileged rights. Malicious actors- compromised insiders or third parties exploit the vulnerabilities arising from standing privileges which eventually lead to data breaches. Too many standing privileges jeopardize the overall objective of the least privilege principle.
The notion – ‘Right person has the right to access the right target systems at the right time’ is simplified with the ARCON | PAM Just- in-Time (JIT) privileges tool.
The solution offers best Privileged Access Management practices to overcome the risk arising from standing privileges, laying the foundation for the Zero Trust Architecture.
JIT Privilege solution
ARCON | PAM Just-In-Time Privileges (JIT) lays the foundation of the principle of least privilege. This practice mitigates risks arising from standing privileges. JIT privileges allow IT administrators to grant privilege rights only on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis. The granted privileged rights are revoked automatically once the task is completed. This way, the administrators can keep a track of the privileged rights easily since they permit rights temporarily only when it is required. JIT privileges reduce and restrict excessive privileges to servers, databases and business-critical applications. Hence, the data breach threat surface is reduced significantly.
The bottom-line
ARCON | PAM JIT privileges capability helps organizations in building the foundation of the Zero Trust Security framework. As the best practices of Zero Trust security follows the mantra ‘never assume trust’, JIT privilege invariably nullifies the possibility of misusing trust. With this security tool, privileges are granted only on-demand for a limited time, and thus the chances to attack the most vulnerable IT assets, privileged accounts, reduce significantly.
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 | Endpoint Privilege Management mitigates risks arising out of endpoints. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.
