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Navigating Privileged Access Challenges with ARCON | PAM SaaS

The Context

In the recent past, ARCON has witnessed a very robust demand for Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions, especially for its full-blown Enterprise SaaS version including ARCON PAM SaaS Standard for SMBs.

There are several emerging enterprise use cases that are boosting the demand for PAM SaaS adoption. 

  • During the past 18 months, IT security and regulatory compliance have become more important due to an increase in insider and data breach threats. In order to establish a secure, robust, and trusted IT framework, organizations across the globe have upped the ante to ensure their network security, data security, end user protection including security of cloud workloads. Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution not just accelerates the pace of digital transformation, but also enhances the security of privileged access environments including compliance. Several mandates such as password change at regular intervals, granular level control, session management including auditing and reporting of privileged sessions can be fulfilled with PAM solution. 
  • Secondly, there has been a sharp increase in the adoption of hybrid work environments. And IT security teams want a VPN-less approach. With hundreds of users accessing systems from different locations remotely, there is a strong demand for a secure gateway that can ensure authorized access to target applications. Furthermore, organizations are facing the challenge of managing, monitoring and controlling the end-users both on-prem and remotely. As a result, there is a dire need to deploy a feature-rich PAM solution that can manage and monitor the end-user activities seamlessly with a unified governing engine. 
  • Moreover, there are IT security challenges that stem from over-privileged entitlements. While managing the pressure of huge IT administrative workloads, IT administrators keep on adding privileges to ensure prompt completion of the IT administrative and operational tasks. As a result, there is an uncontrolled increase in the number of standing privileges. If we consider large and distributed IT environments along with multiple cloud platforms that have increased the number of SaaS applications’ adoption, over-privileged entitlements’ (in this context) misuse or abuse might result in breaches if those trusted privileges are not revoked in a timely manner and/or provided just-in-time access to target applications. 

Why ARCON | PAM SaaS?

Organizations of all shapes and sizes find merit in ARCON | PAM SaaS. Our solutions cater to all kinds of businesses and organizations depending on the size of the IT infrastructure among other features and functionality requirements.

 ARCON has two different solutions as per two different requirements:

  1. ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) Standard for SMBs. 
  2. ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) Enterprise for larger enterprise-grade deployments

The feature-rich PAM Enterprise solution is adopted by large organizations with distributed IT environments, multiple data centers and thousands of privileged users accessing critical systems on a daily basis. Whereas, PAM SaaS Standard solution is relevant for limited users’ IT setup. Irrespective of industry and geography, this solution is readily accepted by more SMBs to secure the privileged environment for both on-prem and on-cloud.

Here is a brief elucidation of the benefits of ARCON | PAM (SaaS) solution. 

  • With this solution, organizations can manage their end-users and data centers from one centrally managed console. Depending on the requirements, the organization can segregate their PAM integration location-wise with similar functionalities for all of them. Moreover, there is user-friendliness of direct logins, multiple session facilities in the same window and hassle-free switching between sessions.
  • To meet compliance demands, organizations can have multiple access control techniques to separate client data and all the sessions are documented for IT audits.
  • ARCON’s PAM SaaS model allows even larger organizations to host PAM services for their third-party vendors that simplifies the access permission of privileged identities and protects them in real-time.
  • With a unique and well-defined policy enforcement, organizations can ensure lucid IT security practices among the end-users in SaaS environments. It affirms that the users are at par with their roles and responsibilities.
  • A robust access control framework in the IT environment ensures only authorized users have access to the business-critical applications. In the SaaS environment, it not just ensures data security, but also identifies anomalous user profiles.
  • As a part of flexibility, ARCON | PAM SaaS helps privilege identities to be on-boarded in bulk with the help of ‘bulk import’ feature embedded within the solution.
  • The product architecture also offers built-in real-time password rotations even in multi-cloud, and third-party environments. While working remotely, organizations can have the convenience of multi-factor authentication for initiation of every privileged session.
  • Lastly, Just-in-Time provisioning in ARCON’s SaaS solution restricts user access rights for a limited period only on on-demand situations. The privileged rights are revoked immediately after the end of the task.

In addition to robust functionalities, ARCON PAM SaaS adoption also boosts your ROI. 

  • Shorter deployment cycle which in turn ensures lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
  • Lower CAPEX as your organization will not have to spend money on setting up on-prem IT infrastructure
  • The SaaS model brings in automatic upgrades. So, organizations barely have to invest their time on consulting and assessing costs to upgrade their software. It not just fastens the process but also ensures business agility.

Conclusion

Our research and analysis show that the organizations are fast adopting SaaS models as it ensures long-term value addition. Both ARCON | PAM SaaS Standard and Enterprise solutions in this regard, are preferred by IT security professionals for its visibility, flexibility and scalability in both on-prem and on-cloud environments.

 

Internal IT Frauds: Reasons & Remedies

IT frauds could be disastrous for organizations if not curbed at the outset. According to a survey conducted by CFE (Certified Fraud Examiners), global organizations witness a 5% loss in their annual revenues due to internal IT frauds. 

The major challenge is that proliferation of internal IT fraudulent activities typically go unnoticed and undetected for a longer period. It costs a bomb to organizations beleaguering their financial conditions and puts a big question mark on their reputation. 

A single IT fraud can be catastrophic if adequate measures are not taken on time.

Types of Internal IT frauds – Reasons

Large organizations and SMBs face various kinds of fraudulent activities internally that leave long-lasting consequences. One of the main reasons for internal fraud is that organizations often fail to keep a check on end user activities. Not only do security staff fail to identify the fraudulent activities but they are also incapable of learning the patterns behind the data abuse or misuse.  

From IT security perspective, the major fradulences are as below:

  • Manipulation of data: Internal users end up manipulating data if he/ she wishes to conceal his/ her mistake or malicious activity while performing any task, and to avoid any kind of punitive actions. 
  • Malicious Intention: Malicious insiders and sometimes compromised third parties that have access to the systems, exploit the IT security vulnerabilities especially in the access control management and steal data, mainly for financial gains. Even other white-collar crimes like skimming of virtual money happens due to poor access control management and inadequate monitoring.
  • Cyber Espionage: In this act, organized cyber criminal groups or malicious third party users collide with some ‘compromised’ insider to extract confidential information for social engineering and zero day attacks. This occurs frequently in government organizations to acquire intellectual property, highly sensitive information and strategic blueprints. 
  • Data Theft: Typically, the culprits behind data theft incidents are organized cyber criminal groups or malicious third party users. However, it has been observed in the last few years that internal users are also responsible for data theft incidents. Lackadaisical attitude towards following IT security policies, including poor access control and sometimes, inadequate knowledge of robust IT solutions that can protect data, results in data theft.

How to Prevent – The Remedies

During the pandemic, many organizations globally have shifted their IT security gear towards predictive measures. With this, organizations can stay proactive in identifying the risky user behavioural profiles and take timely action to prevent data breaches. The advent of advanced and sophisticated technologies like Big data and cloud computing have resulted in multiple and frequent changes in the IT threat patterns.

Benefits of Predictive Security Measures

Predictive user behavioural analytics is the use of end-user data with the help of artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques to identify and detect the possible risks in future outcomes based on historical data. Predictive security measures enable the IT security teams to answer the below critical questions. 

  • Is there any anomaly in end users’ activities?
  • What is happening with anomalous activities?
  • What’s the data patterns and the context behind suspicious events?

In order to vouch for the credibility of the business and the organization, these questions need to be answered. If organizations have a typical distributed IT environment, where the number of end users are large in numbers, the risk multiplies automatically. However, adequate predictive IT security measures in the policies can build a different picture altogether.  

Due to the recent pandemic and other factors, the number of devices is exploding significantly across the globe as organizations look to build a digital infrastructure. Amid increasing pace of digitalization, however, the number of digital identities is going to skyrocket in no time. While the world has 7 billion people, the number of devices has gone up to 15 billion and is expected to reach 50 billion in the next ten years. Hence, protecting these identities from malicious elements through predictive analytics is highly important. 

Conclusion

Is it ever possible to completely eradicate Internal IT frauds? Until we do not have proper user behavioural assessment mechanisms in place round the clock, we are surely at the risk of losing confidentiality of critical data assets. It eventually impacts on the regular business processes and on larger consequences, affects brand reputation and credibility.