Many of you will be able to relate to the experience of staying in a hotel. You approach the front desk where you are greeted and asked for identification so you can be checked in the hotel. The front desk agent confirms the length of your stay and any requests you have made for your room and reminds you that check out is at 11am. The agent programs a keycard for you that will give you access to your room and any common areas for the duration of your stay. However, you can’t use this card to access other guest rooms or staff areas – just your room and the common areas necessary to your stay.
In addition to guest key cards, every staff member has a card as well. Housekeeping may have access to guest rooms, while catering and banquet staff have access to the kitchens and meeting rooms, and managers may have access to everything. If there is a contractor coming in to the hotel for repairs or maintenance, they will also be granted a temporary key card that will allow them to get where they need to do their job.
Hotels operate in this manner to keep its guests, staff members and the property safe. Setting granular permissions for everyone present (at any given time) helps ensure everyone is where they are permitted to be.
Let’s relate that picture to managing privileged access, where organizations can broker secure access to company networks and systems for privileged users and vendors. Using Bomgar Privileged Access, companies broker secure connections to critical systems and networks by applying granular access, similarly to how hotel access is managed. Assign and limit access parameters for privileged users and vendors as if you were programming a key card for them.
By taking advantage of Bomgar Privileged Access, organizations can manage, control and monitor privileged accounts and credentials. For example, senior users (the hotel’s general manager, or his enterprise counterpart—the SysAdmin) should have more access than junior employees (i.e., hotel kitchen staff or tier 1 support reps). To protect against security threats, companies must grant just the access these and other groups need to do their jobs—and no more. By utilizing more than perimeter security to oversee every entrance, an organization can protect its network from unwanted visitors. We compare this in greater detail in “The Hotel of Privileged Access”.
To learn more about securing privileged accounts and privileged access, this webinar offers a closer look into privileged access management and how it can counter the weaknesses in traditional perimeter security technology.
