{"id":7763,"date":"2018-11-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esecurityplanet.com\/2018\/11\/14\/privileged-access-management-pam-controlling-a-critical-cybersecurity-risk\/"},"modified":"2021-01-28T16:22:14","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T16:22:14","slug":"privileged-access-management-pam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.esecurityplanet.com\/applications\/privileged-access-management-pam\/","title":{"rendered":"Privileged Access Management (PAM) Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Privileged accounts pose a serious security problem. Anyone who has access to one has the potential to use those administrative privileges to harm your organization in a number of ways, such as altering data, deleting or downloading databases, or creating unauthorized new administrative accounts.<\/p>\n

The security risk is not just a theoretical one: Recent security breaches at companies such as Uber, Tesla and Timehop all involved the misuse of privileged account credentials, and in the case of Timehop, led to the loss of 21 million users’ personal information. Privileged access credentials were used by Timehop’s attacker to create a new administrative user account at the company’s cloud service provider, and used that new account to conduct further reconnaissance activities in the cloud environment, which ultimately led to the data breach.<\/p>\n

See our picks for top privileged access management (PAM) products<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What is PAM?<\/h2>\n

To address this security risk, Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions enable you to manage and monitor privileged accounts and the people who have permanent authority to access them. They also provide a secure way to give your staff or third-party contractors temporary, controlled access to privileged accounts, without the need to provide them with an account password that they could reuse at a later date or share with unauthorized parties.<\/p>\n

Identity and access management (IAM) solutions<\/a> control access to user accounts; PAM solutions control access to critical administrative accounts. The PAM market is smaller than the IAM market but growing at a much faster rate. Markets and Markets expects the PAM market to grow at a 33% compound rate for the next few years, reaching $3.8 billion in 2021.<\/p>\n

Cloud-based infrastructure and applications are a key driver for companies implementing PAM solutions, because a significant proportion of cloud security<\/a> breaches are caused by failure to control privileged accounts effectively. But today the overwhelming majority of PAM solutions manage access to local systems running in corporate data centers.<\/p>\n

Privileged Access Management benefits<\/h2>\n

The key benefit of implementing a PAM solution is the reduction in the risk of a security breach, including a breach caused by an insider, and the associated costs of such a breach.<\/p>\n

For example, with a suitable PAM solution in place, it becomes possible to provide access in a much more secure fashion to shared accounts, including:<\/p>\n