More and more global organizations are adopting to managed service provider (MSP) model. Cost reduction, IT operational efficiencies and automation are the three key elements any global organization looks out for when it purchases IT services from a managed service provider.
The annual spending on global managed services is estimated to be more than $900 million as important IT tasks like application development, IT maintenance and system integration among other day-to-day processes are outsourced to managed IT service providers.

The Risk

Although service contract agreements between the managed service provider and IT services purchaser covers the scope, objectives and requirements, crystal clear policies on data security and IT governance framework must be the part of an agreement.

Indeed, as contracting MSP, necessarily means migrating corporate data to a third-party, ambiguity over IT security framework could offset the operational gains. This is more important when your MSP is managing privileged accounts. The inherent threat to these highly elevated admin accounts rises significantly when managed in a third-party environment. Who is accessing data? Why was it accessed? When was it accessed? What was accessed? … These are some of the questions that need to be addressed to mitigate insider or third-party threats. There have been many cyber incidents in the recent past that showed poor Privileged Access Management or lack of it, resulted in compromise of customer records, personal data among other sorts of confidential information in the MSP environment.

Poor privileged credentials management and absence of rule and role-based privileged access typically broadens the privileged account abuse threat surface.

Monitoring Privileged Access in Managed Service Environment with ARCON | PAM

The Solution

ARCON Privileged Access Management solution or ARCON | PAM offers best practices to control, manage, and monitor privileged accounts in a third-party environment. Whether data is controlled by MSP or Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), deploying ARCON | PAM offers IT risk control team with actionable data to mitigate looming threats over privileged accounts thanks to its real-time dashboarding and reporting engine.

The solution offers a centralized engine to govern privileged users where role and rule-based authorization policy, controls and monitors privileged users. The solution’s powerful vault engine generates strong passwords and randomizes them frequently to ensure robust password management for securing applications and databases.

In addition, ARCON | PAM enables an MSP with the following best practices in Privileged Access Management:

• Provisioning of both devices and privilege accounts into ARCON | PAM
• Automated de-provisioning from ARCON | PAM, when devices or Privilege Ids are removed from the systems.

The Bottom-line

Cyber-attacks, insider and third-party threats to confidential data remains one of the topmost concerns for IT security and risk management team. The threat has enlarged during the pandemic with remote access becoming a new norm. Cyber-crimes such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), credentials abuse, identity theft increased amid rising IT security challenges. ARCON | Privileged Access Management solution offers both parties – MSP and IT services purchaser, a win-win security framework to ensure mutual gains.

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.