AD security is crucial to controlling risk and ensuring compliance Active Directory (AD) is the foundation of identity and access management (IAM) at most organizations and, as such, is probably the most crucial technology on the network. More and more systems and applications depend on AD and Azure Active Directory (AAD) for authentication, policy, entitlements, and configuration management. If AD is insecure, everything is insecure.

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is one of the most important areas of risk management and security in any organization. Changing business practices, agile software development and digital transformation has meant that PAM solutions need an enhanced set of features to reduce the risk of privileged accounts being hijacked in this more challenging operating environment.

One of the most important aspects of an identity and access management (IAM) program is the securing, management and governance of the accounts belonging to superusers — privileged accounts. Like the accounts used by regular users, these superuser accounts require access management – ensuring that admins have the access they need to do their job — and governance – ensuring that there is oversight and control over that access, often for the purpose of compliance. Unfortunately, privileged accounts have some unique idiosyncrasies that make both access management and governance difficult or impossible with traditional PAM methods. To learn how to deal with those unique characteristics and manage your privileged accounts successfully, assume that the ideal PAM program addresses the broadest range of privileged accounts and elevated-access users. That’s where the problems start for most organizations.

Before there were privileged access management (PAM) solutions, it seemed that everyone was given access to privileged accounts with little regard for who had access, when they had access and what they did with that access. As security breaches started to rise and compliance regulations were written, it was obvious that manual processes and home-grown approaches to privileged access management solutions weren’t enough. Why make the investment to next-gen PAM? After we briefly cover the history of first-gen and next-gen PAM solutions, we will give you five reasons to consider purchasing next-gen PAM solutions. At minimum, we think you’ll be intrigued and, at best, convinced you need to procure next-gen for your organization.

Privileged accounts are a necessity in any enterprise IT environment, since they enable administrators to manage the environment. But as news reports constantly remind us, granting privileged access increases the risk of a security breach, no matter what industry your organization represents. However, your organization does not have to become the next statistic. By taking the five concrete steps outlined in this paper, you can help protect your organization from the risks inherent in privileged accounts.

So where does the power lie in your enterprise? Who has admin access to which resources? And how much are you relying on faith in your current security approach to ensure that the wrong person doesn’t find a weakness and exploit it?