7 Features to Consider When Evaluating PAM Vendors

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to selecting a PAM solution. Every organization has different challenges, requirements, and, most importantly, different risk tolerances they are willing to accept. There are multiple great solutions on the market that serve various purposes and provide additional benefits.

The seven features detailed below are all important elements of a comprehensive privileged access management strategy, but your unique business needs will impact how you weigh each feature in your selection process.

The 7 Modern PAM Features You Should Care About

1. Continuous Scanning

The continuous scanning of privileged accounts helps ensure enterprise-wide compliance and acts as a single source of truth for reporting the distribution of privileged access.

2. Cross-Cloud Discovery

A unified access model utilizing cross-cloud discovery can help provide visibility and insight into misconfigurations, high-risk permissions, and unusual admin activity across your SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS solutions.

3. Zero Trust/Just-in-Time (JIT) Access

JIT access allows organizations to automatically grant and revoke access to human and silicon (machine) users, helping to eliminate the risks associated with standing privileges.

4. Identify and Prevent Lateral Movement

Lateral movement is when an attacker gains initial access to one part of a network and then attempts to move deeper into the rest of the network Reducing the time it takes to detect and respond to these types of threats is key to limiting their damage and your costs.

5. Cloud/DevOps Enablement

In Cloud DevOps, almost everyone has some degree of privileged access, making it important that a PAM solution can provide a secure and streamlined way to authorize and record any user’s activities on any element of the DevOps environment, regardless of where it was hosted.

6. ITSM Platform Integration

A strong integration to your organization’s ITSM tool enables vendor and remote access while adhering to the principle of least privilege and providing audit trails of session activity. This helps securely manage human and silicon privileges to reduce threat surfaces and organizational exposure.

7. IGA Platform Integration

With an integrated IGA and PAM approach, a request for privileged access can be managed within the parameters of the organization’s IGA policies. All access requests and grants are part of a single access control chain. Both basic user and privileged user access become more easily auditable.

With the right PAM solution, your organization can take control of access management and go beyond an expensive password vault while gaining in-depth utilization insight and the tools needed to manage privileged access. This reduces the risk of privileged access management in the organization and the cost of cyber insurance.

With so many questions to answer and features to choose from, finding the right cloud PAM solution is not easy. We are here to help. MajorKey offers a rapid advisory assessment to help organizations identify risks within their privileged assets and how these processes fit into a broader cyber security access control framework.  Contact us today to get started.