Businesses now more than ever, are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. This is why we will focus on prevention and how to stay ahead of attackers with the use of a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution.  

There are many solutions when it comes to cybersecurity. From firewalls to spam filters, to end-point detection, monitoring, and backups, many options. Today, we’ll focus on the weakest link of the chain, us, the users. 

What is Privileged Access Management (PAM)? 

PAM stands for Privileged Access Management. It aims to maintain full control and visibility over the most critical system and data of a business, by exerting the appropriate level of privileged access controls over a business. 

By restricting access rights and permissions for users, accounts, applications, systems, devices and computing processes to the bare minimum, PAM reduces the attack surface. 

Along these lines, we understand that all users’ actions are monitored and can be audited in case of a security breach. Through a robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, administrators can see who exactly is accessing the system and what data are processed so that they can identify vulnerabilities and prevent cyber threats. 

Typically, a PAM solution is made of an Access Manager, a Session Manager, and a Password Manager.  

Focus on WALLIX PAM4ALL 

More concretely, the WALLIX PAM4ALL provides admins with a customizable admin portal allowing them to control access to all WALLIX PAM4All. It supports a scalable multi-tenant architecture that can easily integrate with your existing security solutions and adapt as your organization grows. It also includes audit and compliance tools that create an unalterable audit trail that collects script and session metadata in video-like recordings.” 

6 benefits of using PAM 

If you still doubt the power of a PAM, you should consider the following figures based on the latest data breach report by IBM & Ponemon Institute: 

• Compromised credentials, such as compromised business emails, facilitated 20% of data breaches. 
• Data breaches that were identified and contain within 200 days had an average cost of 3,44 million €.  
• Breaches that took more than 200 days to identify and contain had an average cost of 4,65 million €, a difference of 1.20 million €. 
• In 2021, the average cost of a single data breach was 4,04 million€.

PAM’s benefits

• It helps manage and protect all access from a central location 
• It provides an interoperable architecture, fast and easy to deploy with little operational downtime 
• It adapts to security solutions in place enabling to leverage all capabilities 
• It supports advanced research and search using optical character recognition (OCR) technology throughout your PAM4All
• It meets compliance regulations with automatically generated unalterable audit trails 
• It is a scalable solution that can adapt along with your business growth 

Keep in mind

Privileged Access users are extremely vulnerable as they represent a valuable target for hackers. Hackers can easily rip off users’ credentials with phishing methods or malware. Once inside the infrastructure, they can wreak havoc and wipe off the entire business by stealing sensitive data.  

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