Facilitate Regulatory Compliance with Privileged Access Management

Regulatory compliance is getting harder and harder each day. IT security teams responsible for protecting networks, systems, data, and other assets must deal with legislation enacted for the proper purposes but highly demanding and increasingly stricter.

Institutions and organizations that implement state-of-the-art Privileged Access Management (PAM) can handle multiple requirements, simultaneously and efficiently.

IT teams dealing with excessive workload cannot only focus on protecting connected devices. However, they can ensure compliance by automating more elements, providing the necessary documentation for audits in regulatory surveillance, generating alarms, and creating reports.

PAM software and solutions minimize the risk of data loss and data breaches, and increase the efficiency of daily operations while addressing regulatory requirements.

IT security compliance with ISO / IEC 27001 is a robust, proven framework for IT compliance. Even though the goals set by ISO / IEC 27001 are quite a lot, they only reveal a tiny part of what is required from modern cybersecurity coverage. However, it offers a good starting point.

ISO / IEC 27001 is an information security management standard published by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

ISO 27001 is the most frequently used standard by organizations worldwide to create, implement, evaluate, and continuously improve a robust Information Security Management System (ISMS). This standard defines the specific requirements to be met to establish a framework to achieve an organization's information security goals. The requirements include the commitment of the leading team, an information security policy, and the formal assignment of information security-related roles.

ISO 27001 requires companies to establish their control requirements, at least partially based on a risk assessment, to ensure that all requirements related to an ISMS are met.

ISO / IEC 27001 requires the company’s management team to:

• Systematically examine information security risks of the organization, considering the dangers, vulnerabilities, and their effects;
• Design and implement consistent and comprehensive information security controls and/or different forms of risk handling (such as risk aversion or risk transfer) and address unacceptable risks;
• Adopt an inclusive management process to ensure that information security needs are regularly met with information security controls.

PAM constitutes the first line of defense for organizations as it provides granular control of privileged access, according to a least privilege approach.

PAM is a cybersecurity domain within Identity and Access Management (IAM) that focuses on monitoring and controlling privileged users and privileged accounts in an organization.

Who are privileged users?

In an organization, privileged users may gain access to IT and network infrastructure for operational or management purposes or access sensitive information such as customer records, employee payrolls, and financial records. Privileged users can be:

• The system, database, and application managers who can provide continuous and uninterrupted access to different assets
• Help desk staff with uninterrupted access to different assets
• Business Applications (e.g., ERM, Salesforce) users or an organization's social media account (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter) users
• Non-employee parties, such as dealer support, consultant, or contractor

Why is PAM critical for an organization?

Privileged users can access an organization's critical systems, resources, and assets with high-level or non-restricted accounts, or in other words, privileged accounts. These accounts include local and domain management accounts, service accounts, emergency accounts, application accounts, and they are refered to as the "key to the castle." These accounts often become the target of attacks intended to gain access to critical systems and resources of an organization, These attacks by malicious users both internally and externally have led to data breaches or service interruptions that caused significant business damage. Therefore, privileged accounts pose a potential threat to the security structures of organizations, as they provide high-level/unlimited access to critical systems and sensitive information.

What are the standard capabilities provided by PAM solutions?

PAM solutions provide monitoring, auditing, tracking, and authorization controls to prevent unauthorized access to critical systems and prevent improper use of privileges. Common features include:

• Audit practices and reports to fulfill the requirements of regulatory compliance
• Privileged Account Management (e.g., discovering system/service accounts, safe storage of relevant passwords and randomly changing them, even hiding them from users)
• Activity records (e.g., access requests, logins, added/deleted users or systems)
• Session records (e.g., video recordings of sessions, essential press recordings, command recordings)
• Least Privilege Management (who can access which systems and under what restrictions)
• Integration with Organizational Systems (e.g., Active Directory, Asset Inventory, IT service management, Multi Factor Authentication, (MFA))

Single Connect, Kron’s PAM solution, provides support to the world's largest and most critical organizations, from business to government agencies, service providers and system integrators, as well as a significant part of cloud platforms. Because our structure is built with the cloud in mind, we can help our customers meet their compliance needs as regulatory requirements tighten, as well as meet new needs, including complete reports of executed operations, and identified and resolved activities with our advanced software platform.