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financial, compliance and technological
ramifications later on.”
Morey Haber, Chief Technology Officer
at BeyondTrust
security and facilitate a move to NGTs. Top
practices include controlling and governing
privileged and other shared accounts
(60%, 59%, respectively), enforcing
appropriate credential usage (59%) and
creating and enforcing rigorous password
policies (55%).
In fact, 100% of the survey respondents say
they are employing at least one PAM-related
best practice to avoid NGT problems with
privileged access.
How Privileged Access Management
can enable the transformation to
next-generation technologies
To improve security while reaping the
transformative benefits that NGTs offer,
organisations should implement five
Privileged Access Management (PAM) best
practices that address use cases from on-
premises to cloud.
www.intelligentcio.com
• Best practice #1: Discover and inventory
all privileged accounts and assets.
Organisations should perform continuous
discovery and inventory of everything
from privileged accounts to container
instances and libraries across physical,
virtual and cloud environments
• Best practice #2: Scan for vulnerabilities
and configuration compliance.
For DevOps and cloud use cases,
organisations should scan both online
and offline container instances and
libraries for image integrity
• Best practice #3: Manage shared secrets
and hard-coded passwords. Governing
and controlling shared and other
privileged accounts represents one of
the most important tactics organisations
can employ to limit the effects of data
breaches resulting from NGTs
• Best practice #4: Enforce least
privilege and appropriate credential
usage. Organisations should only grant
required permissions to appropriate build
machines and images through least
privilege enforcement
• Best practice #5: Segment networks.
Especially important in DevOps, lateral
movement protection should be zone-
based and needs to cover the movement
between development, QA and
production systems
“It is encouraging to see that organisations
understand the benefits that Privileged
Access Management can deliver in
protecting next-generation technologies, but
there are more best practices to employ,”
said Morey Haber, Chief Technology
Officer at BeyondTrust. “The survey affirms
that security should be at the forefront
of new technology initiatives, otherwise,
organisations can experience serious
For example, if you consider all the hype and
ramifications of GDPR, any next-generation
technology initiative will be in scope for
breach notification, personally identifiable
information protection, requested data
removal, etc. It is important for executives
and security team members to consider
these requirements during the design and
deployment of next-generation technologies.
If they are overlooked, then implications
of an incident or non-compliance may not
be worth embracing the technology in the
first place. It becomes a cost and benefits
model to ensure that all the security best
practices can be adhered to while delivering
a profitable solution. There are solutions
and services that are now defunct due to
GDPR and this cost benefit analysis assisted
management in determining it would just
not be worth it to continue or retrofit. In
the end, Privileged Access Management
(PAM) represents an approach to streamline
many of the requirements directly in the
initial design or can be retrofitted to existing
deployments to help with the compliance
burden. Every organisation should consider
th is approach even if they do not have
GDPR requirements; “it is just good security
hygiene and best practices for everyone,”
according to Haber.
For more detailed recommendations
and to learn how to implement the best
practices to facilitate the safe adoption of
NGTs, download the full report from the
BeyondTrust website. n
“
THE SURVEY
AFFIRMS THAT
SECURITY
SHOULD BE AT THE
FOREFRONT OF
NEW TECHNOLOGY
INITIATIVES.
INTELLIGENTCIO
99