Best Practices for Privileged Access Management – Charting Your Course

Lewis Carroll once said ‘If you don’t’ know where you’re going, any road will get you there.’ There’s something exciting about turning off the GPS and taking an unplanned road trip every once in awhile. However, when it comes to your IT security strategy, charting your course is critical - there’s too much at stake. With increasing numbers of data breaches and ever-present threats to sensitive information, your best bet is to build a privileged access strategy that will help you protect your organization.

To that end, Gartner recently published a report titled, ’12 Best Practices for Privileged Access Management.’ In the report, Gartner discusses what steps an organization should take to implement privileged access management, from taking inventory of all privileged accounts to establishing access controls and extending identity governance controls to privileged accounts.

Much of what Gartner recommends is in alignment with our approach to PAM. In our strategy paper ‘7 Steps to Complete PAM’, we recommend that IT organizations start by improving accountability and control over privileged accounts, then implementing least privilege and application control for desktops and servers.

One of the biggest challenges that IT security admins face when it comes to privileged access management is where to begin. With hundreds of servers and just as many applications, getting a handle on user privileges, policies is complicated and time consuming. Most organizations have point solutions that handle one aspect of privileged access management, but the true value of PAM is realized when those solutions are integrated. That’s where BeyondTrust comes in: From best practices to practical guidance on deploying a PAM framework.

If you’re in the process of building your own privileged access management strategy, download a copy of the Gartner report. And if you’re attending the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit in Las Vegas December 7-9, please attend our roundtable session titled Privileged Account Management to IAM –Lessons Learned on Tuesday, December 8^th at 10:15am, or stop by and visit us in booth 602 for a demonstration of our integrated privilege platform.