5 Questions to Ask a Potential Privileged Access Management Vendor

Source: Cloud Security Alliance Author: unknown URL: https://www.britive.com/resource/blog/five-questions-ask-potential-pam-vendor

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY:

Choosing the right Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution involves assessing its ability to mitigate risks, support multi-cloud environments, manage non-human identities, and enhance operational efficiency.

MAIN POINTS:

  1. Standing privileges pose significant risks, even with MFA, necessitating zero standing privileges (ZSP) and just-in-time (JIT) access.
  2. Implementation timelines and complexity vary; lightweight, agentless, SaaS-based solutions reduce deployment time and management overhead.
  3. Effective PAM solutions secure both application-level and infrastructure-level access across multi-cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes.
  4. Modern PAM platforms must manage and secure both human and non-human identities (NHIs) to ensure consistent policy enforcement.
  5. Centralized policy management simplifies securing NHIs like CI/CD pipelines, API keys, and machine identities.
  6. Inefficient manual workflows in legacy PAM solutions create administrative bottlenecks and delay access for engineering teams.
  7. Automating access requests, approvals, and expirations reduces IAM team burden and improves operational efficiency.
  8. Implementing ephemeral JIT permissions eliminates long-lived credentials, streamlining compliance and audit processes.
  9. Flexible, policy-driven access controls support diverse use cases while reducing friction for end users.
  10. Evaluating PAM solutions requires focusing on security, operational efficiency, and scalability for future needs.

TAKEAWAYS:

  1. Prioritize solutions offering zero standing privileges (ZSP) with just-in-time (JIT) access for enhanced security.
  2. Opt for lightweight, agentless, SaaS-based platforms to minimize deployment time and complexity.
  3. Ensure the PAM solution supports consistent access management across both multi-cloud environments and infrastructure levels.
  4. Choose platforms that manage both human and non-human identities seamlessly through centralized policy management.
  5. Streamlined, automated workflows and ephemeral permissions improve productivity while simplifying compliance processes.