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Tag: Data Security

5 Reasons Why Privileged Access Management (PAM) is Essential for your Organization

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Security vulnerabilities are not limited to physical spaces in today’s world. With businesses adapting progressive technologies, the current digital ecosystem renders considerable challenges in cybersecurity. Besides developing such challenges, there is a growing change in the motives and toolkits of hackers, a more menacing threat to businesses than it was ten or twenty years ago. 

The world has become increasingly complex, and it is becoming clear that organizations need to prioritize digital security over many other aspects to prevent losses. Implementing a strong and holistic cybersecurity strategy can also provide competitive advantages in the marketplace. 

The fact is, your business needs to be aware and prepared for potential cyber vulnerabilities. If the pace of security updates is out of alignment with the adoption of new technologies, you may have a serious problem on your hands.

Cloud technology is becoming more prevalent than ever. As a result, exterior loaded security measures are out of fashion now since they are easily bypassed, sabotaging the security of business infrastructures. Moreover, supply chains are growing complex, leading to many potential entry points for hackers. The crux of the matter is the nature and motives of the hackers themselves. Earlier, hackers needed to write their codes, but now, these codes are readily available on the internet. The more user-friendly your infrastructure, the weaker it is digital malfeasance. 

Most hackers are money motivated and data is worth a hefty sum. In the unpredictable yet vital information technology sector, there is a constant need to deploy protective measures to meet cybersecurity requirements. 

 

PAM as a Solution – What is it?

The biggest cybersecurity threats lie with hackers who gain easy access to business systems and steal secure data by installing malware or making significant changes to system configurations. A person with privileged access to your system can override security settings anonymously. It is necessary to stay ahead when it comes to privileged access. This is where PAM kicks in. A PAM solution brings the potential to control and monitor privileged accounts that can potentially expose business systems and data to risk. 

Privileged Access Management combines tools and technology, securing critical information of your business. In addition, the solution is capable of enforcing privileged access policies for privileged users. 

PAM administrators can track every step undertaken by privileged users using this solution, providing them with an unalterable audit trail of their activities. In addition, a PAM solution provides effective cybersecurity planning, with the means to assign or revoke privileged access rights. Such users can set up or modify settings on every sensitive system that is equipped with security defenses. Moreover, PAM offers accurate and updated audit records, implements necessary security policies, and efficiently executes privileged access permissions. 

The sanctity of data security depends completely on the organizations’ preparedness in the areas of access control management, user monitoring, robust management of passwords, and others. A progressive implementation of enterprise-class PAM solutions can help you there.

 

Top 5 Reasons to Invest in PAM:

In a world where over 80% of data breaches involve the theft of sensitive data and privileged credentials, investing in a PAM solution should be one of your most crucial security strategies.

Implementing PAM in your business management strategy can bring comprehensive benefits. Here are the top 5 reasons investing in a PAM solution can be a terrific security option to business assets. 

  • Reduce threats to MSPs and MSSPs

MSPs are prime targets for hackers as they offer access to data and devices of multiple companies. Therefore, for such MSPs and MSSPs, there is no better time to invest in a PAM solution.

Large- and medium-sized enterprises don’t have the resources to manage their security and cloud requirements. Outsourcing these cybersecurity responsibilities to MSPs allows you to focus on core business goals. Investing in PAM software can help secure the endpoints of clients and protect passwords efficiently. In addition, ARCON | PAM offers best-in-class control features, bringing efficiency with compliance. 

  • Transparent and Frictionless – 

Cybersecurity incidents are known to generate considerable friction in boardrooms, giving rise to the need for strong and transparent security controls. A frictionless version of cybersecurity is helpful in guarding the access of illegitimate visitors, continuously monitoring such activity. With a comprehensive PAM solution, businesses can work on the principle of “least privilege”, allowing users to only access data that they need. For a hybrid working environment in the post-pandemic era, a transparent and frictionless solution such as the one ARCON | PAM offers is indeed necessary.

  • Operations & Automation-ready 

With the evolution of the IT world, there has been a rise in multi-platform environments and robotic process automation. ARCON’s next generation PAM solution has been designed to take into account the entire processes and policies of privileged access management. It is designed to be operations and automation-ready. In addition, this next-gen PAM solution considers the working processes of admins, bringing maximum transparency while removing friction, enabling transformation and scaling of your business. 

  • New Revenue Opportunities

While offering increased security, PAM solutions are also instrumental in expanding business horizons. With PAM solutions, businesses can work across hybrid environments with ease. The ARCON | PAM solution grows with business systems, transforming them at every step, allowing the business environment to evolve accordingly. With privileged access, your company can expand its existing offerings and increase its revenues. 

  • Ease of Deployment 

Unlike the first generation of PAM solutions, the modern-day solutions of privileged access management demand minimal changes to the environment of your business, its processes, and its systems, easing the overall deployment process.

With the growing availability of next-generation solutions, ARCON | PAM integrates well within your current system and applications. In addition, the ease of deployment allows businesses to gain immediate value from the solution without having to make any major changes in the existing work atmosphere. 

ARCON | PAM is built to address the evolving use case challenges regarding privileged access, offering IT security with granular controls while enforcing the principle of “least privilege” in your business. A company trusted by over 1000 global brands, ARCON provides industry-level solutions to ensure business scalability and security compliance. If you wish to invest in a PAM solution, ask an expert for the best possible security objective!

Role of PAM in Securing Financial Data Assets

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Overview

 

Can we afford to lose the master key of our bank locker? We are always over-cautious about the security of our financial assets. Similarly, in the digitalization era, we are controlling our virtual money through mobile banking, internet banking, UPI and more. The changing consumer behaviour has forced the financial institutions to overhaul their IT infrastructure.  

In the digital era, modern financial institutions must adopt innovative IT mechanisms and security in order to ward off data threats. More importantly, access to Privileged accounts, gateway to confidential information, must be robust to mitigate malicious insider activities and anomalous third-party threats. 

 

Why are Financial Institutions targeted?

Financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies among other financial entities are prone to data breaches. There is a continuous threat to this sector such as financial losses arising from breaches, regulatory penalties along with damage to reputation.

The IT infrastructure vastness and the extent of data sensitivity of this industry have always lured cyber criminals to target this industry for years. 

Financial institutions process, store, and transfer business-critical information and private customer records every day and every hour. This huge and endless process of data accumulation keeps organizations piling on their ‘responsibility to protect data’ every single day. Once compromised, these PII (Personally Identifiable Information) claims a comparatively higher price on the dark web. Thus, this industry is more susceptible to breaches.

 

What are the consequences?

A couple of years back, an Indian nationalized bank suffered an embarrassing IT security breach where the hackers siphoned off almost Rs. 95 crore. The organization has overcome the loss gradually, but the scar of being in the news for the wrong reasons never fades away. Once organizations face such a cyber catastrophe, the victim might face years of:

  • Financial Stress 
  • Legal Liabilities
  • Compliance Penalties
  • Faceloss/ Reputation loss
  • Fear of disloyalty from customers
  • No more proactive investors
  • Stakeholders lack of trust
  • Longer revamp of IT security policies

 

Why is it a challenge for financial institutions?

Our research suggests that cyber attacks against the financial sector increased almost 250% globally between the last two years, with some 80% of financial institutions reporting an increase in cyberattacks during the pandemic. Hence, the severity of cyber vulnerability in the financial sector is quite alarming. There are several reasons behind these whooping figures, but the major among them are

  1. More Third-party Service Providers – With the increasing business operations, the IT expansion goes without control and organizations face the challenge of monitoring and controlling all end-users in the network periphery. 
  2. Adoption of Cloud Infrastructure – Financial organizations are migrating their data centers and overall IT infrastructure on the IaaS platform for more convenience. However, it invites complex security challenges to ponder over.
  3. Lack of Control of Privileged Identities – Too many privilege elevations pose higher risk in a vast IT ecosystem. It results in lack of control and monitoring of the privileged tasks and eventually invites cyber anomalies.
  4. Equal Importance to all Regulatory Compliances – Multiple global regulatory standards help organizations to maintain end-to-end security in their IT infrastructure, though many times organizations fail to follow the mandates and invite non-compliance penalties.
  5. Lack of Zero Trust Security framework – With the advent of both remote and on-prem work conditions, financial institutions need to have Zero Trust security policy to ensure every access to the critical applications/ systems is verified and tested. Without this framework, proactive security control is not possible.

 

So, how can we overcome the challenges? What is the solution?

 

Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution is the best bet

A robust Privilege Access Management solution as ARCON | PAM secures all privileged accounts of financial organizations and helps to protect the information assets proactively. The seamless controlling and monitoring of every privileged access happening in the servers at a granular level limits the moves of a cyber criminal and lowers the chances of security breach. 

The solution offers a centralized engine to govern privileged users where role and rule-based authorization policy, controls and monitors privileged users. 

For IT efficiencies, financial organizations adopt cloud services, although the risks also multiply. ARCON | PAM offers adequate and relevant safeguards when it comes to securing financial assets on the cloud and even on hybrid cloud. The solution creates a robust security shield around privileged accounts in the IaaS environment to prevent illegitimate access and prevent data breach incidents. It reinforces stringent IT security controls by providing a digital password vault, adaptive authentication and dashboard for cloud identity governance. 

In order to manage all the privileged accounts in a financial institution, role and rule-base access is a must. The primary threat always comes from compromised insiders. If business critical applications are accessed without role and rule-based privileges, just-in-time privilege elevation, and revoking privileges after the task is over, then obviously a malicious insider can misuse or abuse sensitive information and wreak havoc. ARCON PAM offers all critical capabilities such as Just-in-time Privileges to target systems, Privileged Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM), and Granular controls to ensure access is limited and only on ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis. 

Financial institutions have to stay compliant to multiple global regulatory standards like EU GDPR, PCI DSS, SWIFT CSCF. As a result, it is always wise to deploy a reliable Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution that helps the organizations to follow the mandates by default and evade chances of any non-compliance penalties.

Lastly, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) has become the benchmark of a robust security infrastructure in modern enterprises. Financial organizations worldwide are facing increased demand for virtual modes of money management. Most of them are striving to ensure seamless and secure remote access across their IT environment, ARCON | PAM offers best security assurance to the risk assessment team by enabling the ZTNA security framework in the overall IT ecosystem.

 

Conclusion

Today, IT security teams of the financial sector demand solutions that are more proactive rather than reactive. ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution offers a proactive approach to secure privileged access to target systems.

Mitigate the Risk of Excessive or Shared Privileged Credentials

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In the wake of expanding IT infrastructure, today’s organizations require their employees to access multiple applications to perform day-to-day IT administrative and operational activities. 

That means, the end-users require multiple credentials to access the multiple applications. Simple? Not at all. It’s a nightmare both from IT administrators and end-users’ point of view. 

The IT helpdesk administrators don’t want to spend too much time on creating credentials, nor they want to do provisioning for too many privileged users, hence credentials. It’s a huge risk. Creating too many privilege entitlements is against the best practices in privilege account management. 

Likewise, the end-users will find it difficult to remember multiple login passwords. Different IT tasks on various applications are done at different hours of the day. So every time the end-user has to log on, she will have to waste time on the validation process while accessing a new application.

To eliminate the security challenge posed by using multiple access credentials for multiple end-users, and IT administrative ineffectiveness, enterprises find merit in assigning Single-sign-on (SSO) to end-users. The technology offers one-time secure administrative access to multiple technology platforms. 

More on Single-Sign-On (SSO)

Single-Sign-On (SSO) is nothing but a validation permit that is given to an end-user to use a single login credential for multiple applications. As per the roles and responsibilities of the end-users, the IT administrators can assign SSO to the end-users. It ensures that they have a limited-period one-time access to applications that are required by the end-users to perform specific tasks. Once the task is completed, the access rights get expired automatically. It secures the IT assets of any organization from any unauthorized and unnecessary access to the elevated accounts without the need of sharing the privileged credentials.

See how ARCON | Single-Sign-On works

SSO is very relevant in the remote work environment

Protecting data at Work- From-Home (WFH) conditions is always a little more challenging for any enterprise. In the last one year, the global pandemic has pushed organizations to adopt remote work culture to ensure uninterrupted business processes. Thousands of end-users access critical information on a daily basis. Any malefactor in the IT ecosystem can wreak havoc on enterprise systems by misusing privileged credentials. The challenge of safeguarding enterprise data might intensify if organizations allow all-time access to the business-critical applications and systems through shared credentials. In this scenario, Single-Sign-On can mitigate the risk of unauthorized access by offering temporary access to the end-users without sharing the credentials.

Why ARCON Single-Sign-On?

ARCON | Single-sign-on, which also comes integrated with our enterprise-class ARCON | PAM, ARCON | PAM SaaS and ARCON | PAM Lite is a powerful tool to ensure legitimate access to critical applications. 

Here are some of the key features of ARCON | SSO:

  • It centrally manages the end-users access to all IT resources such as business applications, web applications, and cloud applications 
  • It can seamlessly integrate with various authentication repositories like Microsoft Active Directory, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and other identity providers
  • It supports standard identity protocols such as OpenID Connect, OAuth, and Security Assertion MarkUp Language (SAML)
  • It automates user provisioning or De-provisioning and reduces the administrative cost involved in managing these end-users
  • It helps to meet compliance, regulations and IT standards 
  • It ensures time-based access on all platforms even at a granular level

Contact us if you are interested in knowing more about ARCON | SSO. 

Conclusion

ARCON | SSO helps the enterprise to mitigate some of the critical access control issues associated with too many end-users and too many applications. The solution offers seamless identification and authorization to protect applications. It is a superb and effective solution to control risks and administrative challenges arising from WFH culture.