How Least Privilege Just Might Save Your Company

This article will help you understand the concepts of least privilege and privileged access management (PAM) and how they apply to your company. Because both the least privilege principle and privileged access management are extremely important to the cybersecurity of your organization, it’s necessary to understand their risks, benefits, and how to best implement them in your organization.

Privileged access refers to special access and abilities given to an employee or user that go beyond what a typical, standard user can access or do. Giving certain employees or users privileged access allows organizations to keep their confidential, sensitive information in the right hands. PAM can also refer to developer access and credential management for database and server access.

The information security concept known as the principle of least privilege, or PoLP, is the idea that employees or users should be given the minimum level of access that they need in order to perform their job functions. The principle of least privilege, sometimes known as least privilege access, applies to anything in your organization that includes secure information. This might include processes and systems along with devices and applications.

In the always-expanding world of technology we are living in today, cybersecurity practices are a huge part of the everyday operation of most businesses. With multiple computing environments and endless applications and devices being used by your team (not to mention third-party vendors or contractors), sensitive information is constantly being passed from person to person. Least privilege access, or the principle of least privilege, allows your organization to be sure this sensitive information is only in the hands of the people who need it to actually complete their jobs.

While least privilege access might seem like a no-brainer, there are still some challenges involved in implementing it. For one thing, organizations don’t even realize where they are over-provisioning access to their sensitive information. Many organizations struggle to keep track of their various accounts and privileges. Secondly, if least privilege access is not implemented correctly, employees can become frustrated and experience disrupted productivity as they try to acquire the access they need. In an attempt to avoid this hurdle, IT teams can find themselves giving all employees or users higher privileges than they actually need.

Privileged access management, or PAM, is a cybersecurity strategy that allows companies to manage and keep an eye on all access levels and activities across their employees and users. Privileged access management is also sometimes known as privileged access security and is rooted in the above described principle of least privilege. Implementing privileged access management allows companies to minimize their risk of external attacks and internal errors

From internal errors to external attacks, there are endless cybersecurity risks within every organization. As companies continue to use more computing environments, applications, contractors, and machines, the risk of a cybersecurity breach continues to grow. Privileged access management gives organizations the best, most granular view of every employee and user’s access levels, ultimately making it easier to spot and act against cybersecurity risks. Without the ability to monitor who has access to an organization’s sensitive materials and assess risk levels, companies leave themselves open for attack and spend way more time and money on IT audits, risk assessments, and, ultimately, damage control after security is breached.

As mentioned above, the principle of least privilege, or least privilege access, is the cornerstone of privileged access management. That being said, there are a variety of other best practices to put into place in order to implement the principle of least privilege when practicing privileged access management. First, it is important to create (and actually enforce) a privileged access management policy. This privileged access management policy should describe the organization’s processes for how access and accounts are provisioned and de-provisioned. The policy should also include information on the organization’s varying accounts and levels of privileged users. As the privileged access management policy is being put into place, the organization should also be identifying, organizing, and managing all places where sensitive information might live. This should include everything from applications and databases to third party vendors and hardware devices. This allows the organization to identify orphaned accounts and other areas where there might be cracks in their cybersecurity.

Organizations face a variety of challenges when working to manually implement privileged access management. In fact, manually tracking and managing all privileged activity and access levels without error is nearly impossible in large organizations. Without the help of privilege access tracking and threat analysis tools, IT teams struggle to track all new accounts created, update privilege access levels, and identify areas where cybersecurity risks exist.

With the help of an application that manages privileged access, organizations are able to escape the cybersecurity risks of human-made errors and burnt out IT teams. Management software allows companies to seamlessly implement the principle of least access and track all privileged access levels.