Privileged Account Management and Application Control in Gartner’s Top 10 Projects for CISOs in 2018

Each year, CISOs need to prioritize what security projects they can devote their time and money toward implementing within their company. This year, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Neil MacDonald, has made that list easier to prioritize. At the 2018 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, MD, he shared Gartner’s top 10 list of new projects for security teams to explore in 2018.

Here are the top ten projects Neil MacDonald recommends:

1. Privileged account management
2. CARTA-inspired vulnerability management
3. Active anti-phishing
4. Application control on server workloads
5. Microsegmentation on flow visibility
6. Detection and response
7. Cloud security posture management
8. Automated security scanning
9. Cloud access security broker (CASB)
10. Software-defined perimeter

Within a blog post, he named privileged account management as the top project CISOs should have on their list. Traditionally, many organizations have operated a policy of trust for users inside their business, ensuring they can work freely and access files according to the demands of their role with full administrator rights. However, removing excess administrator privileges is an essential risk mitigation strategy for organizations and IT departments globally; immediately improving security posture and enabling regulatory compliance.

Privileged account management is the first step that every organization should be taking to improve the security within all their endpoints. According to Avecto’s 2017 Microsoft Vulnerability Report, removing admin rights would mitigate 80% of all critical Microsoft vulnerabilities in 2017. It can block most advanced cyber-attacks, especially when layered with other proactive approaches, such as application control.

Application control tops number four on the list of top Security Projects for 2018. When organizations implement application control, users can retain the flexibility they need to be productive while being secure. By extending the principles of application control to files on disk, you gain precise control over which configurations, directories and documents are accessible to users.

Avecto recommends combining privileged account management and application control for the strongest protection. When organizations combine application control with privilege management, admin user rights are eliminated, and system files and folders are safe to trust. This allows CISOs to focus on unknown or user applications, greatly reducing complexity. When combined with privilege management, access to privileged files can be quickly and easily granted, without needing to assign admin rights to either the user or the application. A single policy engine also means there’s no risk of conflict.

How Avecto can Help

Do you still need more reasons on why privilege management is crucial to all organizations? Read Avecto’s article on why removing admin rights is crucial to your security plans, why it isn’t so hard to do, and how it can be done without hindering productivity.

Avecto’s Defendpoint product can help CISOs implement privileged account management and application control to ensure minimum impact for end users, with maximum productivity gain. Working in tandem with application control, this powerful combination makes whitelisting simple – allowing IT leaders to assign privileges directly to applications, tasks and scripts to protect the endpoint against attacks that hit the operating system.

For more information on Defendpoint, request a demo today.

What’s number one on your security to do list?