By 2023, 40% of enterprises will have adopted a Zero Trust strategy to improve access and security across their architectures, according to Verizon’s Data Breach report. The reason? IT environments are more fluid, open, and ultimately more vulnerable than ever before. Additionally, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to manage the revolving door of technology trends and threats like ransomware, cyberattacks, remote workforces, hybrid infrastructures, elevated requirements, and dynamic business models. It’s a long list that continues to challenge and grow the complexity of security stacks across the enterprise. Bottom line: access management is more challenging than ever.
So it’s no surprise that when making future-forward security decisions for your organization, you’re looking for ways to decrease complexity while still delivering a security strategy (like Zero Trust) to successfully combat these realities and threats as they evolve. For instance, you may be inclined to solve privilege and identity with just an identity and access management (IAM) solution. But, while convergence is a powerful weapon against complexity and threats, it’s only through automation across multiple solutions like identity access management and privileged access management (PAM) that you can deliver on the promise of capable cybersecurity, precision, and Zero Trust in the battle against the changing technology headwinds.
IAM or PAM
Some experts argue identity access management and privileged access management are the same. You can tackle both with just an identity-focused solution and on the surface level that checks out. However, this type of convergence can be detrimental because even though they both handle users, access, and roles, they deliver protection for different audiences and levels.
Identity and access management administers ordinary users and identities by controlling granted access and experience within an application or scope. Privileged access management, on the other hand, assists access through the control, monitoring, segregation, and auditing of all privileged credentials. Furthermore, privileged access management solutions enable privileged users by defining, controlling, and evaluating the roles of administrative users.
By implementing only one or the other, you miss a big part of the security equation. Privilege access management is an evolution of your identity governance and management program and is less effective without the bedrock of an identity access management system.
IAM and PAM
Identity access management provides the foundation that privileged access management enhances through elevated access. This reality makes identity access management and privilege highly complementary.
By ignoring the different scopes and risks associated with each, you can jeopardize the security and strength of your stack. Using identity to handle your privilege challenges, for example, will result in you falling short in discovering and classifying elevated credential accounts and security groups. Further, this type of convergence and consolidation comes at the cost of unique benefits and capabilities of a PAM solution such as session monitoring.
A common platform that utilizes identity access management and privileged access management’s complementary proficiencies, however, is a powerful answer to new trends and threats like cloud environments, bring your own devices (BYOD), IoT, remote workforces, and more. Automation across multiple solutions (combined with Zero Trust principles, policies, and practices) can deliver cybersecurity and precision in the battle against cyberattacks with capabilities, including:
- Identity access management
- Multi-factor authentication
- Single sign-on
- Privileged access management capacities
- Randomized, encrypted, replicated, and vaulted passwords
- Auditing and visibility of access activities
- Session recording
- Management of non-human identities (such as service accounts, DevOps,, etc.)
You can gradually evolve your security program through converged authentication and privilege management with a unified platform that brings access management symbiosis. By leveraging this shared platform and the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), you can ensure only the right people (who are verified by IAM) have the right level of access to the right systems (governed and managed through PAM processes).
Distinct Yet United
When you implement a security framework that coalesces the capabilities of identity access management and privileged access management without conflating the two, you can build a successful cybersecurity program through access management. A shared platform more easily connects your identity groundwork to the elevation that privilege brings. This 360-degree approach that keeps the distinct capabilities of identity access management and privileged access management but maintains a common platform and overlap creates identity-based security synergy.
The Power of One
In the battle against technology trends and threats, automation across identity access management and privileged access management can be a game-changer for your organization’s security. Then, combining this approach with Zero Trust can remove risk even further and give you better insight into your cybersecurity.
Learn how to transform your identity protection from a fragmented access management state to a connected shield of a Zero Trust security strategy across a converged identity and privileged access management platform on January 27 at our Power of One Summit.
Join Bravura Security security-based identity experts to help you create Zero Trust and access management synergy at session four of our Power of One summit, Zero Trust, Zero Silos: Convergence of Identity and Privilege.
