Last June at the 2018 Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, the analyst firm issued a “Smarter with Gartner” paper outlining the Top 10 security projects for 2018, which included Privileged Account Management. While Gartner clarified that the ten projects were in no particular order, PAM was right there at the top.
This was not a surprise to Centrify, as we’ve seen global cybersecurity spending reach $124 billion but privileged credential abuse is still the leading attack vector. Forrester estimates that 80% of breaches involve a privileged identity, and that 66% of companies have been breached five times or more.
Despite increased spending, the problem is not being addressed and organizations are still putting themselves at risk of a privilege-related breach.
GARTNER DOUBLES DOWN
On February 11, 2019 Gartner issued a new report: “Top 10 Security Projects for 2019.” And guess what? Privileged Access Management (PAM) was not only included AGAIN but Gartner has also estimated PAM to be #2 in information security spending growth for 2019. There are only so many projects a security team can take on and PAM should be one of them, along with email security, CASB, and projects like container security.
PAM is also estimated by Gartner to be the fastest-growing segment (by growth rate) of all Identity and Access Management solutions. It’s wonderful to see the market and the analysts determine that PAM is some of the lowest hanging fruit that gives you the biggest bang for your buck towards securing your data.
So, this is two years in a row that Gartner has named PAM a Top 10 security project. What are you waiting for? The time to start or continue your PAM project is NOW, and remember, legacy-PAM is no longer enough to today’s modern threatscape. What’s needed is cloud-ready Zero Trust Privilege.
3 STEPS TO ZERO TRUST PRIVILEGE
Centrify has a 3-step implementation methodology that can help you reduce risk and strengthen your security posture with a Zero Trust approach, no matter where you are in the maturity journey.
- Don’t have a password vault? That’s a good place to start. We have vault solutions for shared accounts & passwords as well as application passwords & secrets, for your hybrid and cloud environments. The Centrify Privilege Access Service can be consumed either as a SaaS subscription or can be customer-managed and deployed in your own datacenter.
- Already have a vault? That’s great! Now it’s time to go beyond the vault in the PAM maturity model, with identity consolidation with least privilege. Just-in-time access with just-enough privilege, with multi-factor authentication at least at NIST Assurance Level 2 for administration access. Identity consolidation means reducing the attack surface by significantly lowering the use of local accounts on systems and instead replacing with federated individual directory accounts that utilize short-lived tokens rather than static passwords. Both steps help significantly increase security.
- If you’re further down the road with PAM, that’s fantastic! But there is surely more to be done – any security project is never truly finished. Harden your environment with high assurance. It’s time to consider that it’s not just humans who are logging in, but also applications and service accounts. It’s time to integrate with your SIEM and your ITSM for better insight and governance.
For more information about how Centrify Zero Trust Privilege Services can empower your PAM projects in 2019, visit https://www.centrify.com/education/what-is-zero-trust-privilege/.
Or go direct to get your free trial here: https://www.centrify.com/free-trial/
The post Gartner Names PAM a Top Security Project (AGAIN!) in 2019 appeared first on Secure Thinking by Centrify.
