Key takeaways:  

• What is PAM? Key details, definitions, and context 

• How to plan and execute a PAM strategy 

• The buyer’s guide to PAM software, tools, and features 

Privileged access management is the process that organizations go through to control which users and systems have access to sensitive information and IT infrastructure. The goal is to reduce unnecessary access as much as possible.  

The fewer privileged accounts your organization has, the harder it becomes for hackers to infiltrate them. Without elevated privileges, it’s much harder to pull off a successful attack.  

Privileged account management (PAM) therefore includes a range of tools, techniques, and processes that IT teams use to govern and monitor these admin rights. Doing this effectively has a direct impact on your ability to withstand a security attack, so it’s crucially important to get this right.   

💡Deep dive: What Is Privileged Access Management (PAM)? 

But why is privileged access management so important? What are the main tools and techniques it involves? And how do you implement them in a way that boosts both security and the end user experience?  

To find out more, keep reading…   

To understand the importance of PAM, we first have to consider some of the most serious types of cyber threats. Generally, these are going to involve large-scale data breaches, ransomware, or attacks on critical servers or infrastructure.  

All these tactics are going to require some level of elevated permissions for a hacker to pull off. Without these admin rights, there is a much smaller range of tools at their disposal to research, execute, and disguise a successful attack.  

An effective PAM strategy can therefore significantly reduce the damage a hacker can do – even if they’ve already gained a foothold in your environment. This is why PAM is such a fundamental aspect of effective cybersecurity.    

💡Deep dive: Importance, Challenges and Use Cases for Privileged Access Management [TBC] 

Privileged access management can be a complex and multi-faceted topic. But at its most basic, there are three underlying principles that all good PAM strategies should include:  

• Implement least privilege – Least privilege is fundamental to effective PAM. It states that users and service accounts should only have admin rights and access to sensitive data when their role specifically demands it.  

• Avoid privilege creep – Over time, privileges tend to expand in an organization. New users join, others leave, some people gain promotions or start working on new projects… All these require new privileges that tend not to get revoked when they’re no longer needed. IT teams need to therefore constantly monitor expanding privileges to avoid the attack surface being larger than necessary.  

• Get the right technology – Without the right tools, PAM is either difficult or impossible. There are simply too many accounts in the average organization for manual processes to be effective. Investing in leading PAM tools is therefore the best way to stay safe.   

💡Deep dive: Privileged Access Management (PAM) Best Practices 

Types of privileged accounts 

One of the most common PAM mistakes that organizations make is to only focus on user accounts.  

In truth, there is a whole range of different account types you need to be aware of. To get PAM right, you need to understand the full scope of admin privileges that a hacker can access. Generally, these fall into two main categories:  

• Privileged user accounts: These belong to employees or contractors. They include privileged business users who can access sensitive information (eg managers/finance teams). There are also several tiers of IT admins who can install programs, change settings, and access critical IT assets. These include local, domain, and root/superuser admins. 

• Privileged service accounts: These belong to machine identities like RPA workflows, IoT devices, APIs, and more. The category includes application accounts, service accounts, and active directory/domain service accounts. 

💡Deep dive: Privileged Accounts 101: Everything You Need to Know 

When a hacker gains elevated rights, they have access to a much wider range of malicious tools, techniques, and actions. This can include:  

• Performing reconnaissance – Hackers may want to explore the IT environment to assess defenses and identify critical assets or data to target.  

• Remove evidence – They may also try to cover their tracks by deleting log files or registry entries. This makes it more difficult to see the attack coming and identify the hacker once complete.  

• Privilege elevation – Some admin accounts have more privileges than others. If a hacker has local admin rights, they’ll likely use these privileges to further expand their rights, either to a domain or root level admin.   

• Insert malware – Local admin rights often let hackers install malware. This can be their ultimate goal (eg ransomware/data exfiltration) or a tool to help enable other actions on their list.   

💡Deep dive: Admin Rights in Action: How Hackers Target Privileged Accounts 

Three key features in advanced PAM solutions  

There are several different types of PAM features. The right ones for you will depend on the size and complexity of your organization, as well as the specific IT assets being protected. Here are three of the most important:  

• Privileged account discovery – This allows organizations to identify and keep an inventory of all privileged user and service accounts. Without this, least privilege is very difficult to effectively implement.  

• Role-based access controls (RBAC) – A feature that enables organizations to assign and delegate permissions based on job roles. This makes it easier to govern privileges on an organization-wide level.  

• Just-in-time access – A feature of more advanced PAM tools. This lets IT teams eliminate standing privileges and assign admin rights on a case-by-case basis, for time-limited periods.  

💡Deep dive: Privileged Access Management Features: What You Need in Your PAM Solutions 

PAM can be a minefield of overlapping terms, acronyms, and definitions, making it uniquely difficult for organizations to understand what tools and features you need. To help clear the confusion, here’s an overview of the most common definitions:   

1. PIM vs PAM vs IAM:

You can think of these three terms as the Russian doll of PAM terminology, with each being a subset of another:  

• Identity access management (IAM) is the umbrella term for all processes that manage and secure digital identities, including non-privileged accounts.  

• Privileged access management (PAM) is therefore a subset of this, focusing on accounts with elevated privileges.  

• Privileged identity management (PIM) is a type of PAM tool/process, focusing specifically on managing identities and their associated privileges. PIM and PAM are often used interchangeably.  

💡Deep dive: PIM vs PAM vs IAM. Definitions and Roles in the Cybersecurity Strategy 

2. IPAM:

This stands for internet protocol address management, which is used by organizations to manage IP addresses. It helps track which IP addresses are assigned to which device and avoid duplicate addresses. Having a clear IP address inventory makes it easier to monitor and protect internet activity.  

💡Deep dive: What Is IPAM in Cybersecurity? Key Components and Benefits 

4. PEDM: 

Privileged elevation and delegation management (PEDM) solutions are a more advanced and specialized security tool. Generally, they are used by businesses to implement just-in-time access controls, which can dynamically grant and revoke elevated permissions based on context.  

💡Deep dive: Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM) Explained: Definition, Benefits and More 

5. Application control:

This is the process that organizations go through to govern which applications can be accessed by users. Generally, this is done through allowing or banning specific applications, known as either ‘whitelisting’ or ‘blacklisting.’ 

This helps avoid employees using unsanctioned applications (known as ‘shadow IT’) and creating accounts that can’t be seen or managed by the IT team.  

💡Deep dive: Application Control 101: Definition, Features, Benefits, and Best Practices 

6. Just-in-time access:

An advanced PAM feature generally available through PEDM tools.  

With JIT access, all accounts are unprivileged by default and users can dynamically request elevated rights for specific tasks. IT teams can then build automated policies to decide when these requests are granted, to whom, and for how long. 

This reduces your attack surface to the smallest possible amount and makes it incredibly difficult for hackers to gain elevated privileges.  

💡Deep dive: Just-in-Time Access (JIT Access): The Most Sophisticated PAM Feature on the Market 

How to implement privileged access management in your organization: 

Effective privileged access management is a bit like maintaining a particularly unruly hedge: There’s no point trimming it back once and then leaving it indefinitely. If you want to keep on top of privilege creep, PAM needs to be a constant and iterative process. Here’s what that involves:  

• Identify privileged accounts – First, run a privileged account scan to identify all elevated rights across user and service accounts. Ideally, you should have a centralized inventory that is regularly monitored and updated.   

• Identify sensitive assets – Then, determine what critical systems and data privileged users may need to access. This will largely include sensitive data (personal and financial information for customers/employers), intellectual property, or critical IT assets.  

• Remove unnecessary access – Then, eliminate any unnecessary privileges across user and service accounts.  

• Implement modern PAM protections – There is a whole range of tools at your disposal to protect admin accounts. This could include role-based access controls, just-in-time access, multi-factor authentication, and more.  

• Monitor privileged accounts – The best PAM tools also include features to monitor activity on privileged accounts. Using anomaly analysis, this can help you proactively identify suspicious behavior, so hackers are identified before they can do damage.  

💡Deep dive: Effective Privileged Access Management Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide 

How to conduct a successful privileged access management audit: 

Conducting a privileged access management audit is an important way to diagnose the health of your PAM strategy and understand how to improve it. This is important to do when rolling out a PAM policy and should be reviewed at regular intervals thereafter.  

Check out the full guide below to find out the key steps to an effective PAM audit.  

💡Deep dive: How to Conduct a Successful Privileged Access Management Audit 

How to create a privileged access management policy: 

Creating a PAM policy is similar to the steps we took in the ‘implementing privileged access management’ section above. But crucially, this involves a series of subjective decisions about what PAM protections you’re going to include and how you’re going to implement them.  

These include:  

• Which sensitive data/assets exist in your organization that require protection?  

• What tools you’re going to use to govern access, including PASM, PEDM, CIEM, password management tools, and more? 

• Which risk signals require a response, and what those policies will be? Eg a user logging in from a new location could require multi-factor authentication. 

• How you’ll govern password policies. This could involve rules to enforce password strength and rotation, or implementing password vaults, multi-factor authentication, and more. 

💡Deep dive: What Is a Privileged Access Management Policy? Guidelines and Benefits 

💡Deep dive: How to Create an End-to-End Privileged Access Management Lifecycle 

How to manage cloud-based PAM security 

Today, there are few IT environments that don’t depend on some level of cloud technology.  

For privileged access management, this creates key challenges. Often, each cloud app or environment will have its own set of privileges – making it difficult to manage these centrally.  

However, a series of cloud-specific PAM features can help manage these challenges:  

• Continuous monitoring: This involves session management tools to monitor activity on privileged accounts and respond to suspicious events.  

• Just-in-time access: Removing standing privileges entirely can make it much easier to avoid privileges developing on cloud apps or instances that you don’t have visibility over.  

• Automated discovery: Privileged account discovery can help us identify accounts and identities across cloud apps that may not be officially sanctioned or monitored by IT.  

• RBAC controls: This can reduce the confusion and hassle of managing admin rights. Since there are fewer job functions than individuals in an organization, it’s easier to delegate permissions based on a user’s place in the org chart.  

• Password encryption: Security tools are increasingly evolving past the need for end users to remember plain text passwords. Instead, a combination of multi-factor authentication, password vaults, encryption, and tokens can be used to authenticate users based on more reliable factors.  

💡Deep dive: A Guide to Effective Cloud Privileged Access Management 

💡Deep dive: The Complete Guide to PAM Tools, Features, And Techniques 

Is privileged access management software worth your investment? 

Privileged access management software is an absolute must if you want to effectively audit, manage, and protect your privileged accounts.  

But not all PAM software is built the same. The industry’s leading tools have a wealth of cutting-edge features, but they can also be expensive and difficult to use. More straightforward tools are generally more cost-effective and simpler for non-technical teams, but they may have fewer options to customize and design your own policies.  

Other tools may specialize in specific features, or managing particular devices and operating systems.   

It’s important to understand the needs of your business and the specific feature set on offer before choosing the right PAM solution for you.  

💡Deep dive: Top 11 Privileged Access Management (PAM) Software Solutions in 2024 

Often, this is included in wider cybersecurity platforms, such as Heimdal’s managed extended detection and response (MXDR) service.  

💡Deep dive: What Is PAM-as-a-Service (PAMaaS)? 

Elevated privileges tend to expand and accumulate in even the most security-conscious organizations.

Keeping on top of this ever-widening attack surface is one of the most difficult aspects of PAM.

Getting it right requires constant vigilance and effective security processes.  

Of course, there are many different PAM tools, processes, and strategies available. The right solution won’t be the same for every organization.

But by far the most important thing to remember is this: You can’t secure what you don’t understand. Any accounts, identities, or privileges you don’t have oversight over can ultimately be used to plan a successful attack.  

This is why it’s so important to understand the full scope of admin rights in your organization and apply least privilege at every level.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be well on the way to building a sustainable and secure PAM strategy.