Today, organizations are managing their IT infrastructure with an increased number of challenges. They have to monitor too many privileged accounts in the vast IT network and manage the security of a huge stream of data. Thus, organizations find Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as better alternatives to handle this massive task of ensuring enterprise IT administration efficiently. Hence the demand for Managed Service Providers has shot up significantly in recent times.

Typically, organizations decide to migrate IT operations to the MSP environment to ensure business continuity with better management of data and when they have less manpower to manage the IT processes and tasks. However, MSP is a third party environment and if the vendor pays scant attention to the IT security posture, then organizations might fall prey to unexpected data breach threats.

In the recent past, the pattern of cyber threats is witnessing a high level of sophistication, which is driving organizations to re-architect their security posture into a Zero Trust security framework. ‘Zero Trust’ in the MSP environment is “most-required” because this is more of a data-centric security approach rather than just a conventional IT security approach which focuses only on network security. It helps the organization to refrain from assuming the trustworthiness of the user, rather it analyzes the behavioural risks of the user from information gathered.

Security Preparedness

The major security challenge, while managing data in the MSP environment lies with the uncontrolled and unmonitored access to privileged accounts. Since organizations are bound to share the privileged account details and confidential information with the third-party, the entire infrastructure becomes vulnerable to unauthorized access.

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a comprehensive solution that reinforces the data security in MSP environment. Deploying PAM helps in maintaining a unified policy engine through which all the privileged activities are routed through. It keeps a vigilant eye on the privileged users in the MSP environment by governing all privileged activities through rule and role-based policies. Besides, it provides the deepest form of granular level control to control and restrict unauthorized users in the network. Robust password vaulting helps the administrator to change and randomize the privileged passwords frequently in a highly secured electronic vault. Above all, ARCON | PAM’s AI and ML capabilities elevate the level of security much higher and deeper.

To sum up, ARCON | PAM offers these benefits to maintain data security in MSP environment:

• Centralized administration of all privileged activities
• Session recording and threat analysis on the dashboard
• Single sign-on access to all underlying devices and ensures administrative efficiency
• Granular level control that restricts and elevates commands to control critical activities on target devices
• Mitigation of threats arising from unauthorized access in critical systems with multi-factor authentication which includes adaptive authentication
• Monitoring of every privileged session with detection and suspension of suspicious privileged sessions with real-time alerts
• Comprehensive reports for all privileged sessions to fulfill audit and regulatory requirements via Audit Trails
• Frequent rotation of privileged access credentials of all privileged users

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

• Mr. Martin Kuppinger, Principal Analyst, KuppingerCole Analysts AG
• Mr. Kai Budel, Solution Architect, Prianto
• Mr. Martin Scherrer, VP, Business Development, ARCON

What was the objective behind this webinar?
Organizations migrate IT operations to IaaS platforms such as Managed Services to ensure business continuity with less manpower and low cost. However, with several IT and Privileged users processing an enterprise’s confidential data, security challenge can be huge if there is a lack of control over people and policies to manage and monitor privileged accounts access.

Inadequate security measures to protect privileged accounts can pose high risks to an enterprise IT environment. Therefore, a comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) is imperative to mitigate third-party threats. This is considered as the core of any modern cybersecurity strategy. Organizations often face challenges to control and monitor the privileged activities due to a lack of time, budget and infrastructure.

This webinar focused on:

• The risks posed by insufficient Privileged Access Management (PAM)
• Things to be considered by organizations looking for PAMaaS

In the initial part of the Webinar, Martin Kuppinger, Principal Analyst at KuppingerCole, explained the importance of PAM for all types of environments with specific emphasis on the ones involving MSPs, and the risks that come with inadequately managed privileged accounts.

Martin explained why Privileged Access Management (PAM) should be there to build a robust security around IT infrastructure and for ensuring authorized access to target systems. He emphasized that a PAM helps in IaaS environment in the following ways:

• Risk Mitigation
• Compliance
• Cyber Attack Resilience
• Overall Security
• Split Responsibilities
• Workforce Enablement
• Avoiding Human Error

The discussion proceeded towards proper restriction based controls in elevation of the privileges which ensures that the users can do only what they are required to do and nothing more. And in order to ensure that restriction, Martin explained that there has to be the following rules:

• Defined responsibility of the user
• Specific Services and Control
• Prioritizing work and role
• Adequate assistance
• Granular level control
• Privileged Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM)

He emphasized that a complete PAM solution is a combination of features and not a single solution. Starting from password management to privileged sessions monitoring, the best privileged account management involves:

• Shared Account Password Management
• Privileged Session Management
• Application to Application Password Management
• Session Recording and Monitoring
• Controlled Privileged Elevation and Delegation Management
• Privileged User Behaviour Analytics
• Endpoint Privilege Management
• Privileged Access Governance

In the second part, Martin was joined by another speaker Kai Buedel, who is the Solution Architect at Prianto, ARCON’s regional partner from Germany. He gave a brief introduction of Prianto services and introduced ARCON, an ISV specialized on PAM software and explained the feature-set and solution design for PAM as a service. Kai covered both MSP and customers from security perspectives. In the process of explaining the importance of PAM solution, he emphasized on the fact that 75% of data breaches happening today are due to privileged account compromise. As a result, he highlighted that the customers expect a secure environment from an MSP providing the PAM as a service. He underscored the fact that MSPs trust ARCON PAM because the robust solution has a best-fit and highly-scalable architecture that can ensure secure access due to the following capabilities:

• Single-Sign-On
• Dual-Factor Authentication
• Password Vault
• Access Control
• Session Recording
• Secure Multi-Cloud
• Secure Multi-Site

In the times to come, stay-tuned because ARCON would be conducting more webinars that would focus on several relevant industry use cases and discuss how its risk-predictive technologies can mitigate security threats arising from malicious insiders and unauthorized IT users.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

Take for instance, the Managed Service Provider (MSP) model. MSP is a cost-effective alternative for organizations to ensure business continuity with limited workforce and capital. Enterprises can divert resources to other operational areas as transferring workloads to MSP provides an IT infra to store/ process data and work on a host of applications among other rudimentary computing services. In other words, it saves a huge amount of money as there is no upfront IT capital expenditure. MSP remotely manages any organization’s IT infrastructure or user systems based on a specific organizational policy.

Addressing risk factors

Outsourcing of IT operations to a third party environment involves an element of risk. Indeed, as an organization migrates IT workloads to IaaS environment, there is an imminent threat to confidential data. Privileged accounts risk abuse from malefactors in the third-party environments.

Some of the common challenges related to privileged access for security and risk management team include:

• Who is accessing privileged accounts?
• Is there a granular level control over privileged users?
• Are IT and privileged users segregated in terms of roles and responsibilities?
• Are privileged sessions monitored?
• Is there a robust validation mechanism?
• Are audit trails maintained?

Join our webinar.

“Challenges for Managed Service Providers Offering Privileged Account Management as a Service”

on July 2, 2019, 4pm CEST, 10am EDT, 7am PDT.

REGISTER here.
https://lnkd.in/ep6GRxi

Speakers:

Martin Scherrer-VP Business Development ARCON
Martin Kuppinger- Principal Analyst Kuppingercole
Kai Büdel-Solution Architect Prianto

With so many IT vulnerabilities looming large, it is highly imperative that the security posture to protect privileged accounts is robust in MSP environments. Even if the third-party offers complete assurance about maintaining the security of all the endpoints in the network, it is always advisable to avoid taking chances.

In order to minimize the risk vector, it is critical to adopt best privileged access management practices so that all privileged accounts are monitored and controlled.

Privileged Access Management offers a centralized control point through which all access to critical business applications and database servers are routed to audit trails whilst real-time monitoring and strong validation mechanism would mitigate data breach threats.

ARCON | PAM a trusted name in MSP environments

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution provides comprehensive solution to Privileged User Management. It helps to mitigate both internal and external risks by controlling Privileged Account user access to enterprise data. ARCON | PAM can reduce the risk and cost of managing privileged users and reinforce access controls around privileged users.

Benefits include:

• Robust Privileged Access security across entire vendor network
• Granting Access Control to Privileged Users only on ‘Need to Know’ ‘Need to do’ basis
• Generate Privileged User Reports of MSP from security access logs quickly, making audits easier
• Address regulatory compliance
• Ensure data security
• Enforce accountability and segregation of duties
• Proactively report on the status of key compliance policy
• Reduce administrative cost and complexity

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.