Companies are aware of the value of all types of data to optimize their processes and benefit their business. Customers, employees, and suppliers are leaving a data trail necessary to know how to store, process, and protect to obtain accurate information to discover new business opportunities, optimize operations, and save costs, making investments profitable.

The channels of access to this data are increasing. It is no longer only necessary to pay attention to the endpoint devices that people use (mobile phones, tablets, laptops, PCs) and the machines themselves interacting with each other through automated processes and the IoT.

What Is Privileged Access Management?

Implementing solutions for identity and access management makes it difficult for cyberattacks to succeed. The privileged access strategy defines the capabilities of users, whether human or not when entering corporate IT applications and infrastructure. The theft of privileged credentials is the main objective of practically 100% of today’s most advanced cyberattacks. If they succeed, they obtain the key to virtually ‘walk’ through the systems they want.

In companies, there are multiple accounts with privileges: IT administrator accounts to configure systems and applications; network domain management accounts from which to administer systems and servers; user accounts to access their work programs; developer accounts. The challenge is how to control and monitor all of them at the same time to protect them from increasingly sophisticated threats. This is where PAM comes in.

What Does PAM Mean?

PAM (Privileged Access Management) is a solution for managing privileged access. Allows you to provide highly delimited privileges for the user profiles that you define. With PAM management, companies can centralize access management by monitoring them to protect critical IT resources, avoid security vulnerabilities, and comply with GDPR and sector-specific regulations.

PAM’s control over accesses and privileged identities allows proactively detecting a cyber threat and solving the identified incident. By granting delimited access levels to the work tasks of each profile in the case of humans or the implementation of specific processes in the case of machines, it is easy to identify abuses of privileges automatically.

The management of PAM privileged access is a key piece within the cybersecurity strategy of companies, which includes the IAM solutions and the MDM (Mobile Device Management).

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Against the background of blurring boundaries between on-premises, cloud and hybrid scenarios, more and more questions arise, such as

Where are the limits of the network?

Which devices connect to which applications?

Who conducts activities out?

All of these are questions in the area of digital identity – and one thing right from the start: Although not only human individuals in the network represent identities, but also devices, applications, websites, and the like, it is not a mistake to start here with humans. If you look at a software stack around the topic of identity and access management (IAM), you should take the perspective for which an IAM platform also stands: namely for the (by no means banal) question of who and what when and why does.

Username And Password Are Any Credentials

People act in many different ways in their digital environments to achieve goals: starting a VPN connection to work remotely, opening a customer account to shop online, and so on. The user cannot do this on his own – so other digital identities help smartphones, tablets, VPN servers, etc. For these to work properly and to do what the user wants, the identities must “know” each other, trust each other and beyond any doubt can interact with each other. For example, when it comes to applications that transport sensitive data, process payments, or the like, it is extremely important that only the identified user can act himself – and not a person who masquerades as this user.

So if a system does not really “know” a user, but only more or less any “credentials” such as username and password, the door is open to identity theft – with all its unforeseeable consequences. Data loss is just as important here as blocking services, injecting malware, and ultimately damaging reputation and customer trust.

Authenticating digital activities through active inputs such as user names and Co. is not identifying. Access is only granted based on an entry – but anyone who knows this access data could make it. If the classic “multi-factors” of authentication are added, the process is moving more towards identification. Two-factor authentication (2FA), which in addition to the access data also asks for a TAN on another device or a physical token, is still not personal. However, if the end device requests a fingerprint to open the TAN or to continue the initiated process, a hard-to-copy, personal factor is included in the access process.

First The Identity Provider Is Controlled Then An Access Token Is Generated

But where in humans an iris scan, face recognition, fingerprint, voice recognition, etc. guarantee personal security: what are comparable patterns when it comes to network devices, machines, algorithms, etc.? The IP address alone and possibly typical connection behavior seem to be a relatively thin basis to guarantee real identification that corresponds to that of a human user.

A very helpful connection can be made between human persons, the devices they use, and, for example, the services they call up. The linchpin here is an identity provider that human users control via their devices. This acts as an agent and the requesting device receives an access token. As a result, there is directory access for the individual – an access manager takes care of corresponding policies, and further access tokens are then tied to this context.

The Identified User Only Makes The Network Component Functional

For illustration, If you look at a restaurant stove with an IoT connection, for example, you will find out that the stove itself, of course, does not know the patterns and characteristics of the individual, individual cook who is standing on the appliance. However, if the cook identifies himself via an identity provider, he will receive access tokens to be able to start up the stove at all. The device only starts to function when the user is identified.

Also Read: What Is A WISP? (Wireless Internet Service Provider)

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