Privileged accounts are one of the largest cybersecurity threats to any organization. These powerful accounts contain the rights to perform administrative, maintenance, and other key system tasks across a network. These accounts can be accessed by multiple technicians in any given day, for regular maintenance or an urgent task. And for busy IT departments under pressure to keep things running smoothly, security is sometimes overlooked for productivity.
Projects to secure privileged access often leave out groups with admin credentials, such as help desk personnel who typically have local admin access to all employee computers. Or they fail to consider non-traditional privileged accounts, such as logins to social media. These may not be “admin” accounts, but if someone nefarious hacks into your company’s Twitter account, your brand could suffer significant damage.
Part of this struggle for many organizations is not knowing where all of these accounts are. So if you can’t identify all of your privileged accounts, it’s an even bigger challenge to secure them.
As more companies move resources to the cloud, they’re struggling with privileged access management for cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure. Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) is yet another area of privileged access management that companies need to address in their overall strategy.
Check out this webinar for more insight into shoring up your security posture, including more robust solutions for managing and securing vendor or third-party access, the ultimately and avoid the pitfalls of privileged access.
Sam Elliott, SVP, Products, Applications, PPM
At Bomgar, Sam is responsible for the product management group that is driving product strategy for Bomgar’s security products. He has more than a decade of information security, ITSM, and IT operations management experience. He also is a seasoned expert in the areas of cyber-security, data center discovery, systems configuration management, and ITSM. Sam has a Bachelor of Science from Florida State University and is certified in ITIL v3 and Pragmatic Marketing. He resides in Atlanta, GA with his family and can be found on twitter @samelliott.