Top 10 Reasons You Need Privileged Account Management Now

Don’t underestimate the complexity organizations face with managing and sharing access to privileged accounts. BeyondTrust has a wide variety of solutions that address the various challenges of privileged accounts. Here are 10 key reasons our customers need and value the PowerBroker Password Safe solution:

1. EVERYONE has trouble managing privileged passwords – While some organizations may attempt to manually manage passwords for privileged and key accounts, that approach does not scale, does not deliver individual accountability, and does not provide an acceptable audit trail. Eventually these organizations will face an external audit and will fail. Or worse still, they will be exposed to a high visibility cyber-attack.

2. Employees are the biggest threat – PowerBroker Password Safe, provides the individual accountability, control, and visibility necessary to limit administrative access by preventing unauthorized access to shared “superuser” accounts. High frequency password changes can also be implemented by PowerBroker Password Safe to provide total security of all accounts at the end of the work day.

3. Privileged account management should not be difficult or complex – PowerBroker PasswordSafe offers an all-inclusive privileged account management appliance that can be delivered in a phased approach to meet immediate requirements while easily expanding to add functionality or expand to other areas within an organization.

4. “96% of breaches were avoidable through simple or intermediate controls*” – most breaches can be avoided with a simple approval process as provided by PowerBroker Password Safe. Automatic or manual approvals for all requests, as well as ticket system integration provides true dual control over the privileged accounts. (*source: Verizon Data Breach Report)

5. Compliance demands a Password Safe – to achieve compliance (for example to SOX, PCI, HIPPA, etc.) privileged access must be controlled and shared/generic accounts should always be disabled or locked down. PowerBroker Password Safe allows the account to remain active with total password security, and adds the required accountability for anyone that needs to use the account.

6. Manually changing administrator passwords result in failed audits – PowerBroker Password Safe automates administrator and all other privileged account password changes across the enterprise. Manual processes may be costing the organization hundreds of man hours annually and still leaving those accounts vulnerable to misuse.

7. Control of privileged accounts must be complemented by a complete audit trail– PowerBroker Password Safe provides full visibility and a comprehensive audit trail into which privileged accounts are being used for each system, by whom, for what, and when.

8. Hard-coded passwords in applications or scripts presents unnecessary security vulnerabilities – PowerBroker Password Safe removes the need for hard-coded passwords in applications, scripts, and forservice accounts relieving the threat posed by developers having access to accounts with elevated privileges.

9. Future proofing your connector set – In order for any automated password management tool like PowerBroker Password Safe to be truly effective, wide use and adaptability are highly important factors. PowerBroker Password Safe allows organizations to build new connectors on the fly to interoperate with customer, home-grown and other systems without default connectors. Password Safe provides this without the time and cost associated with professional services by allowing Managed Platforms to be added and customized directly from the GUI.

10. Auto-Discovery for systems and accounts – As new systems come on-line/off-line, users and admins join and leave an organization, PowerBroker Password Safe can scan your network and automatically add/remove users & systems. Auto-discovery can also be achieved using integration with common directories such as Microsoft’s Active Directory and other LDAP.

Without a system of checks and balances and overall accountability for privileged and embedded passwords, an organization could expose its mission-critical systems to intentional or accidental harm, as well as malicious activity that is both difficult and costly to repair. With PowerBroker Password Safe you can now audit and control access for all types of privileged accounts like shared administrative accounts, application accounts, and local administrative accounts.