Privileged Access Management “PAM” software is frequently used to enable an extensive access security strategy to prevent data breaches and attacks due to stolen privileged credentials or malicious activities. IT managers and network administrators must efficiently secure access, control configurations, and log all activities in the data center or network infrastructure, where any failure to access privileged accounts could result in a material impact on business continuity.
A PAM solution consistently protects management accounts, controls privileged user access, enforces segregation of duties, logs user sessions and activities, provides accounting, compliance auditing, and operational efficiency, and helps to prevent security breaches.
Return on Investment (ROI) Approach
Similar to any form of preventative measures, the importance of cybersecurity products is also likely not to be understood before an incident occurs and an additional layer of cybersecurity is generally seen as a profit-free expense in annual budget planning. Besides, due to the nature of business; organizations never have enough resources to deal with emerging threats from both personnel and budget standpoint and as a result of that, CISOs often struggle to get the board to understand the right aspect in cybersecurity prioritization.
In general, organizations have been inclined to prioritize their cybersecurity investments on perimetral security. However, today privileged access management also plays a crucial role in protecting the systems and mitigating the risk, considering the 81% of all data breaches in 2019 were linked to lost or stolen user credentials and 43% of successful breaches were linked to internal actors, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.
Of course, the average cost of a data breach varies by industry, however respected security reports show us that the cost of an average data breach could cost up to $400M, depending on the number of records compromised and the value of the related data. It is a well-known fact how costly reactive measures and a cross-functional incident response plan can be, not to mention lost reputation and indirect impacts after a data breach has occurred.
An investment in a solution to proactively provide control and accounting over privileged access will help to reduce the attack surface due to the malicious use of privileged credentials used in data breaches and eliminate some of those reactive costs.
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Audit Preparations
GDPR, HIPPA, ISO 27001, SOX, PCI DSS, NERC, NIST, and many others, all require security controls, auditing, and monitoring, in the field of privileged access. Depending on the industry and compliance regulation, the fines can vary tremendously. As well as failure to comply with regulations can lead to fines, the reputational damage becomes inevitable when breaches are made public, an investment in PAM goes beyond technical and tactical to strategic and smart.
Labour cost reduction
One of the many benefits of automated PAM process is reducing the manual labour costs that IT departments spend on privileged account discovery, management, password rotations and audit report generation for any internal or external stakeholders.
System Downtime and Operational Damages
The segregation of duties and required level of trust features play a critical role in preventing the operational damages. Minimizing or eliminating the costs associated with service outages after attacks or due to intentional or accidental misconfigurations is crucial.
Data Breach
PAM software ensures compliance with data security regulations by disciplining access to critical IT assets. For enterprises, a data breach is not just a security issue, it is an issue that needs to be addressed in terms of various aspects and obligations. Minimizing or eliminating legal compensation due to successful attacks is just the tip of the iceberg. A data breach most likely to results in the termination of business partnerships, bad publicity for your organization, demands of entities whose data was compromised, and loss of trust and income of your clients.
Incident Response
In general, organizations need to have a comprehensive incident response and disaster recovery plan for the sake of the business continuity. However, a data breach incident response plan could be way costly than any other operational incidents. In order to fill the gaps and mitigate the impact associated with the data breach, establishment of a cross-functional team consisting of IT staff, information security personnel, legal representatives, business representatives, data officer, corporate communication representatives and external investigators may become inevitable.
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