Month: November 2022

Overview 

Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution is an absolute must for any organization looking to ensure data integrity and security while also fulfilling compliance requirements.

 A robust PAM solution offers all-around capabilities such as just-in-time access to target devices, privileged access threat analytics, session management and session recording, privileged elevation and delegation management (PEDM), and reporting, among other features. Nowadays, secrets management and cloud infrastructure and entitlement management (CIEM) are some of the advanced use cases that are supported by a mature PAM.

Nevertheless, it is important to always remember that any enterprise’s PAM initiatives can not produce optimal results and the desired level of security unless an organization maintains a good balance between people, processes, and policies. Indeed, implementing PAM is only the foundational step for constructing secure perimeter security. 

To a large extent, the effectiveness of PAM depends on how IT security and risk management teams build internal processes and policies to manage users and services that have privileges to access critical IT infrastructure. This is the one area that requires the utmost attention. 

However, there is another area where an organization’s PAM initiatives might go haywire. There can be budget overruns, a high total cost of ownership (TCO), and a lower return on investment (ROI) if the PAM solution has too many issues with its architecture. 

 Indeed, while choosing a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, some other factors like implementation tenure, infrastructural preparedness, and cost effectiveness also matter. Any SME or large enterprise can reap the benefits of implementing PAM only if the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is low and the Return on Investment (ROI) is high.

And there are several factors that determine the effectiveness of a PAM project.

Sometimes the PAM architecture is so complex that adjacent integrations become a nightmare, increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO). In many cases, the UI and dashboards are so unfriendly to users that administrators always find it difficult to effectively administer the privileged users. 

ARCON PAM: The best-fit architecture for higher ROI and lower TCO 

ARCON’s major value proposition is providing an enterprise product with all cutting-edge features, a faster implementation time, and 24*7 support at the lowest cost of ownership for the client. That is possible because of our architecture, our modular approach, and our connector framework, which ensures smooth integrations, has the technical capabilities to integrate disparate technologies, and provides support for modern-day use cases like DevOps, Secrets management and RPAs.

ARCON has implemented its feature-rich and highly scalable PAM solution in some of the most complex IT environments that include telecom infrastructure, MSP environments, and critical infrastructure of large banking organizations.

What sets ARCON | PAM apart from others?

Technology architecture: ARCON’s architecture is such that it ensures high performance and scalability with minimal third-party and software requirements, keeping the TCO low. 

Scalability: Thanks to its scalability, an enterprise’s IT infrastructure and security team can seamlessly add new resources to their infrastructure. In other words, the solution is not resource-hungry and does not require significant investments from an IT infrastructure perspective. 

Support for hybrid architectures: The demand for cloud-delivered PAM solutions is on the rise as enterprises look for efficiency gains. However, the complete migration of legacy applications and mission-critical applications to the cloud is not always the case. Both on-premise and cloud infrastructure are realities. Therefore, we offer a solution that supports hybrid architectures with our broad set of connectors to manage legacy applications and cloud infrastructure simultaneously.

Out-of-the-box integrations: ARCON has the biggest stack of connector frameworks to support both third-party tools’ integrations and quick deployments. Additionally, we can provide connectors built on-the-fly, if required, ensuring swift deployment. 

Administrative ease and higher ROI: While the architecture itself is the best fit, customers are always happy with the higher ROI. The solution provides an intuitive workflow matrix and a very friendly user experience. Comprehensive visibility over privileged access environments, fulfillment of compliance requirements, customer data privacy, and a strong review mechanism all make ARCON a solution that ensures administrative ease, resulting in a higher ROI.

Conclusion

Modern organizations with complex IT infrastructure always search for a PAM tool that can offer robust security features and is easy to deploy. It is always challenging for IT security and risk management leaders to choose the right, relevant, and effective PAM tool that can map their requirements and offer the best solution. ARCON | PAM solution’s robust and unmatched security and compliance features, along with its best-fit architecture, put it ahead of the competition globally.

Information security compliance in the banking Industry

Regulatory compliance is the process of following laws, rules, and regulations that are pre-specified for organizations as per industry standards, trends, and demands. Among all industries, the banking industry is said to be the most sensitive and vulnerable in terms of cybersecurity. Any data breach or malicious activity has long-term ramifications.

Massive digitization in the banking industry has resulted in efficiency and convenience for both banking organizations and customers in the recent past. But what about security and compliance after the IT infrastructure transition? 

A strong and well-defined compliance culture ensures adherence to fair information security practices, manages conflicts of interest, and treats customer data fairly. Thus, compliance policies go beyond what is legal and embrace broader standards of integrity and a code of conduct. Although most of these standards come from external requirements, the organization’s internal rules, IT policies, and business procedures need to work according to the policy standards.

What do the RBI guidelines say?

The RBI (Reserve Bank of India) has provided a set of stringent cyber security guidelines to help both government-authorized banks and privately-run banks mitigate IT threats that linger every day. RBI officials have done ample R&D to collect evidence, feedback, and opinions from various banks (including financial institutions) to identify security risk areas and prepare guidelines to secure the IT security infrastructure of the banks. As per the circular, RBI has also added that the IT operations team and the IT security team have to be two separate entities so that the IT security infrastructure receives better management.

As per the latest released compliance guidelines, RBI demands the below for an overall IT security framework.

• End-to-end protection of customer data
• Advanced real-time threat detection
• User access control & management
• Vulnerability assessment and Seamless monitoring of user activities
• Extra focus on extended network in Shared environment

The context behind access management challenges

The risk management team in banking organizations spends sleepless nights to ensure the end-to-end security of multiple data centers and the privileged accounts that are spread across shared IT environments. A single misuse of privileged identity can impact critical banking assets and bring downtime to the entire IT infrastructure. The challenge becomes more intense as parts of the operations are managed and controlled at the back end. Moreover, if the privileged accounts are shared among many end users, then how crucial would it be to ensure real-time threat analysis of every activity? In the context of digitalization, the current IT ecosystem is more vulnerable to threats.

Currently, there are no clear guidelines for banking organizations that want to adopt cloud computing. As a result, banking organizations are reluctant to migrate IT workloads to on-cloud environments. However, sooner rather than later, when the RBI does come out with a set of guidelines, many access management challenges will arise, like the segregation of end users’ roles, policies to manage users, and managing and revoking the rights of over privileged users, among others.

Why is Privileged Access Management significant?

Regarding the challenges as discussed above, here are the IT security loopholes that lead to catastrophic incidents in banks.

• Lack of IT governance framework
• Poor real-time monitoring of the end-users
• Inadequate or no user authentication mechanism
• Poor password management or vaulting of passwords
• Absence of reporting and audit of the privileged activities

ARCON’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution helps organizations mitigate malicious insiders and third-party threats proactively. It ensures that the IT risk and compliance management teams can have the best privileged access management practices to build the foundation of a robust identity and access control framework. This solution with high scalability provides a secure gateway that ensures role and rule-based access to target systems. 

ARCON | PAM seamlessly monitors each and every privileged session in real-time, and the admin can keep an eye on the live sessions to find anything anomalous. It helps them take immediate and necessary action. The overall access mechanism is based strictly on ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ principles, even at a granular level. To validate the users based on their roles, ARCON | PAM offers Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), which authenticates users and seamlessly integrates with third-party authorization tools. Moreover, the Password Vault frequently randomizes and changes passwords to create a crucial security layer. 

Lastly, the Audit Trails feature helps banks stay audit and compliance-ready, as ARCON | PAM provides a detailed report of every privileged session in both text and video formats.

How does ARCON | PAM help banking organizations to comply with the RBI mandates?

As said earlier, here is the reason why Indian banks chooses ARCON | PAM over the rest:

• End-to-end protection of customers’ data: ARCON | PAM allows or restricts commands based on server, group, or users and controls the permissions for commands fired by users based on the roles and responsibilities. Hence, unauthorized access is prevented in real-time.
• Advanced real-time threat detection: Real-time session monitoring of ARCON | PAM helps the IT administrators to keep an oversight on all privileged activities
• User access control & management: The password vault of ARCON | PAM automates randomization and generation of dynamic privileged passwords regularly and offers MFA (multi-factor authorization) to ensure secure access to applications, databases, and cloud resources. Granular access control and command filtering capabilities helps banks to implement ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ principles.
• Vulnerability assessment and Seamless monitoring of user activities: ARCON | PAM reinforces banking security infrastructure with real-time threat analytics to spot suspicious activities and prevent data breach incidents. Centralized administration and monitoring ensures that every access to the logs are captured both in video and text formats for audit trails.
• Extra focus on extended network in Shared environment: The solution manages and governs all privileged identities in a bank’s IT environment. Role and rule-based access ensures that every privileged identity is authorized and validated.

Conclusion

The RBI has issued the above compliance guidelines to make sure that every Indian bank is compliant with the regulatory standards. However, cyber incidents do occur, and the victim banks end up repenting for their non-compliance. ARCON | PAM solution, once deployed, helps banks follow the RBI guidelines and stay away from data loss, non-compliance penalties, and other legal consequences.

The Context

Infrastructural changes in the enterprise IT environment are unavoidable. Continuous additions and alterations of new users, devices, and servers put organizations’ IT security at risk. IT administrators’ challenges revolve around continuous monitoring of the end-users’ activities, detection of anomalous activities in the network; and frequent audit and compliance. Even a single mis-configuration on any device in the enterprise network can be very risky if not addressed on time. 

Apparently, endpoint security is a less-discussed area. Malicious insiders or even third-party users can compromise the business information assets by misusing endpoints like deleting or changing files in systems. And these unauthorized changes on files can happen at any time, and by any means. 

Non-detection of changes made can be catastrophic not only from a regulatory compliance perspective, but also from security perspective.  Hence, IT administrators need a solution that offers everything under one roof.

In this context, File Integrity Monitoring (FIM), has become a critical component of endpoint security. 

• File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) is crucial to complying with IT standards 
• FIM is also important to ensure IT operational effectiveness as without this tool organizations can face operational challenges    
• A large number of approved and unapproved changes in the files can create confusion, risks, and IT negligence

However, it can be argued that a standalone FIM security solution will seldom help to achieve the desired security level and compliance standards. If data integrity has to be effectively managed, FIM security features have to be integrated with endpoint security platforms for better risk assessments. This way, security and risk management teams can manage comprehensive security around endpoints.

Fortunately, enterprise’s IT security teams’ search stops with ARCON’s Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) solution. The solution now comes with an in-built File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) feature. This addition has transformed this solution into a complete endpoint security package. It addresses the challenges of: 

• Lack of tracking of unauthorized file changes on user devices in real-time 
• No track of file history, and rollback, if required
• Lack of IT operational inefficiency
• Non compliance with IT standards 

Why is File Integrity Monitoring an additional edge?

IT infrastructure is constantly changing and complex. File Integrity Monitoring continuously assesses the changes or transitions happening in the enterprise network, especially to the critical file servers, devices, important applications or other IT systems. 

FIM is a tool that finds out the change and records it with further analysis to determine whether the activity is authorized or not. Not only that, the most revolutionary and remarkable feature of FIM is that it can also reverse the action by transforming the system or application to the earlier baseline configuration. As a result, the IT administrators get a chance to rectify any action that is suspicious in nature. The tool raises an alert for the entire change as an official intimation to the IT security team.

The File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) tool in ARCON | EPM keeps a thorough check on any unauthorized file changes/transfers on end-user devices and identifies if the ‘change’ is an unauthorized one. If required, the entire action is rolled back. Indirectly, it works as a threat predictive tool by indicating a warning that some malicious/unexpected action has taken place. If any organization is unaware of the activities, then it could remain unaware of the possible threats to the IT infrastructure.

With this, it largely helps organizations comply with the standard IT security measures. As it ensures the integrity of files, it helps in complying with the  mandates such as PCI-DSS, SOX, ISO 27001 among others. 

Conclusion

Implementing File Integrating Monitoring tool is crucial to maintain a balance between IT operational effectiveness, compliance, and data integrity. If deployed improperly, it can create friction in IT operations. ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) provides integrated FIM functionality that helps to construct robust endpoint security frameworks, and helps to comply with IT standards.