The security risks associated with privileged access need to be balanced against requirements for operational efficiency by all enterprises and businesses. Security and IT operations leaders should learn about effective and risk-aware privileged management.

Privileged access poses a major challenge for the management in most organizations. They are slowly waking up to the need for managing privileged access by proper monitoring and controlling.

Challenges

The key challenges which need to be addressed by a privileged access management system are as follows:

1. Unrestricted and unmonitored use of privileged credentials are allowed by many organizations. As these credentials are shared by many users, personal accountability is severely affected.
2. Striking violation of the principles of least privilege is practiced by many organizations as they provide full super-user privileges to application developers, DBAs and others.
3. Absence of specialized tools make effective procedures for managing privileged access and shared accounts troublesome.
4. A lack of proper governance model for privileged accounts is noticed to exist in many organizations. This leads to governance issues, such as accumulation of privileged access, orphaned accounts, ownership conflicts etc.

 According to Gartner by 2018 the inability of organizations to properly scope and contain privileged access will be responsible for up to 60% of insider misuse and data theft incidents.

The types of privileged accounts are explained below.

Privileged Access management tools

It is possible to use manual processes to manage privileged access in theory, but practically it is too cumbersome to do so. It is virtually impossible to enforce such practices without the use privileged access management tools. They are classified into four main categories:

1. Shared-account password management tools – Enables the administrator to control the use of shared accounts that are privileged in nature.
2. Application-to-application password management tools – Enables the administrator to control the use privileged application accounts for programmatic access.
3. Superuser privilege management tools – Allows the users granular, more context-driven and time-limited use of superuser privileges.
4. Privileged session management tools – Enables the user to manage privileged sessions to target systems and provides logging and monitoring of privileged activity.

Different tools address different aspects of the problem. The usage of these tools within effective processes is considered to be the best practice. Although, ideal combination of these tools may vary for different organization, depending on the security and operational requirements. The below graphic lists out other best practices for privileged access management.

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