Privileged Access Management (PAM) is no longer optional. With hybrid work models, remote access demands, and cloud adoption, enterprises must secure privileged credentials to prevent insider threats, unauthorized third-party access, and costly data breaches. A modern PAM solution like ARCON Privileged Access Management (PAM) provides a strong foundation to control, monitor, and secure elevated access. 

The Remote Work and Cloud Security Imperative 

Overcoming the Limitations of Legacy Tools 

During the pandemic, enterprises leaned on VPNs and VDIs. However, these tools proved resource-heavy and vulnerable. ARCON PAM replaces these with lightweight secure web gateways, delivering frictionless yet secure access for administrators and vendors. 

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) 

As organizations migrate workloads to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms, visibility over entitlements and privilege usage becomes critical. ARCON integrates CIEM features within its PAM platform, ensuring: 

• Full visibility into cloud entitlements and access paths 

• Detection of privilege escalation risks 

• Secure, just-in-time privilege assignments 

ARCON PAM: Enterprise-Grade Features 

There is an array of features that allow enterprises to balance security, compliance, and operational efficiency.  

• Integrated Ticketing System for streamlined access workflows 

• End-to-End Secure Privileged Sessions with recording 

• Audit & Reporting capabilities for compliance and investigations 

• Real-Time Dashboards for visibility and control 

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to enforce least privilege 

• Seamless Active Directory (AD) Integration and extensive connectors 

Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR): Identity-based attacks remain one of the most dangerous cyber risks. To counter this, ARCON PAM leverages ITDR capabilities: 

• Detecting anomalous behaviors and risky activities in near real time 

• Identifying compromised or high-risk identities 

• Enabling proactive threat mitigation 

This ensures that enterprises move from a reactive to a proactive security posture. 

Fast Deployment and Higher ROI: With the largest PAM connector stack in the industry, ARCON accelerates implementation across complex IT landscapes. Its microservices-based architecture guarantees: 

• Rapid deployment 

• Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) 

• High Return on Investment (ROI) 

This combination makes ARCON PAM both future-ready and cost-effective. 

Conclusion 

Every privileged account is a potential cybersecurity risk. By choosing ARCON PAM, enterprises gain control, visibility, and assurance over privileged access while reducing risks across remote, on-premises, and cloud environments. ARCON’s customer-first approach has earned trust and recognition globally.  

Beyond security, ARCON PAM empowers businesses with cyber resilience, regulatory compliance, and high scalability — making it the natural choice for modern enterprises. 

Similarly, from corporate perspective, any organization can come to a standstill without adequate manpower. In order to propel business volume or speed, the management very often banks on an efficient group of people to fulfill the objective. Sometimes, it requires to add more heads to attain strategic objectives. In a nutshell, the more number of efficient people, the more productivity and business revenue.

Is it always the same?
There is a say – “Too many cooks spoil the broth!”

Apparently, it is contradictory to the proverb we mentioned earlier. When too many people gather in a place to complete a single task, then there are high chances that the task might be spoiled. There can be several reasons behind the same:

Too many opinions and clash of those opinions leading to disastrous results

Too many people appointed for a very simple task leads to unproductive consequences

The more number of people means more dependability on others instead of taking own responsibilities.

There are several instances where we find that a greater number of people, even if having enough efficiency, fail to accomplish a task. This happens when organizations fail to realize that a work which can be done by two people, should be assigned to two people only. More number of people might unnecessarily hinder the output.

Is ‘more the better’ idea relevant to Privileged Access security?
Enterprise IT ecosystem expands continuously due to increasing IT operations. Confidential information, personal data, databases, applications, among many other kinds of sensitive data keep on generating and accumulating.

To manage this ever-increasing large volume of data, organizations often create privileged accounts which provides access to confidential information. IT managers create privileged accounts and assign trustworthy users who can access, process, and manage data assets as per the prescribed role and rule. However there are two common mistakes in managing privileged accounts.

Firstly, Privileged Identities that are typically created on ad-hoc basis, have a tendency for escalation. The higher number of privileged identities demand greater IT oversight, which in turn increases IT operational and security challenges.

Secondly, it has been observed that many times administrators fail to revoke privileged rights after completion of the task and eventually the number of privileged accounts keeps on increasing in the network. This indirectly creates a huge risk for an organization because there are chances that the unmonitored accounts could be misused by malicious insiders or even suspicious third party users with privileged rights. Malicious elements typically eye privileged credentials to steal confidential information.

In the case of Privileged Access security, the more number of privileged accounts higher the IT risk. A higher number of privileged accounts might not be a smart idea because too many accounts increase administrators’ challenge. It creates a security gap. Less is better when it comes to the number of privileged accounts because it reduces the attack surface. Organizations should adopt Least Privileges principle. The concept of least privileges means that IT administrators limit allocating new privileges as far as possible. If the task can be done without privilege escalation then administrators should resist the creation of new privileged accounts.

To sum up, the conventional idea of the strength of more might not be always right when it comes to privileged access security. Less (number of privileged accounts) is better as far as IT security risks are concerned.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

Predict: Adequate and channelized planning and evaluation of all user identities who access or require to access the accounts.

On-board: On-board all the major Privileged accounts including the shared accounts, named entities, service accounts to the PAM solution. At the same time, the number of privileged accounts should be bare minimum – exactly which is required to perform tasks.

Changed Password: Strategic planning of a proper password creation and rotation ensures all privileged accounts in the network are protected with password management policies. In addition, simple and lucid password characters that are easily predictable should be avoided.

Protect: Passwords are managed in the electronic password vault which is highly available and tamper proof in nature. Since its very difficult to establish a manual control over password change process, thus password vault automatically generates dynamic passwords for several devices at one go.

Request: Design a work-flow for access control to all relevant stakeholders within the enterprise IT environment.

Approve: It is very crucial to designate someone competent to make sure that correct approvals are defined for each and every access request to the privileged accounts. This must be managed by a solution with right audit trails to track such approvals.

Access: Defining access rules linked to the critical privileged accounts and individuals are the next important thing to ensure strict vigilance.

Control: Stringency in the security policies can control password release function and password usage function for all equipment in the system.

Monitor: Restriction of time and duration of access hours is very important to monitor user activities. Also, service, application, software accounts that are allowed remote interactions should be under security radar round the clock.

Prevent: Lastly, Privileged Access Management (PAM) program should have preventive access control policies to stop unauthorized accesses and granularly control critical activities of the IT/ system administrators.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

You must be thinking many organizations still use them. Think again, do they? Everything you need right from information to shopping to paying bills is available at the click of a button on a laptop, tablet or a smartphone. Over the past two decades, technology including the internet has truly been on a revolutionary path. So how has this transformation happened? How is it that all the information we need can be accessed through any device from the biggest to the smallest? One of the phenomena responsible for this radical change is called Cloud Computing.

Cloud computing in very simple language is like a one stop shop. You want to access information, store information, monitor, communicate, organize, compute and almost anything you need is enabled by this internet-based computing. Cloud computing enables for a seamless access to a shared pool of configurable resources such as networks, servers, databases, storage and applications to name a few. Most of the organizations are shifting their businesses on cloud courtesy low infrastructure cost, high performance, more scalability and accessibility. You can’t resist but acknowledge that Cloud computing is a blessing.

Having said that, there are two sides to the same coin. Such high levels of technological advancement and automation comes with an excess baggage of security threat. Hackers are always eager to find a way to penetrate and disrupt the systems in some way. In addition, with the rise in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trends, organizations are facing a challenge of provisioning and managing large number of identities within the organizations. Owing to this, security has taken a front seat such that itis being enabled to centrally manage, control and secure information accessed by identities. Access management practices are under tight scrutiny with regulators constantly updating and increasing the controlling standards.

This is the reason that Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions have become uniquely important to organizations across industries. Cloud IAM is a simple solution that answers who, what and which – who has what access for which resource. It helps control, manage, and record user identities and their respective access permissions that can be instrumental in protecting company confidential records thereby preventing cyber threats. But is that enough? Maybe, maybe not.

We have heard of several catastrophic insider threats in the recent past, from large enterprises to SMB’s. These companies had good security policies in place but maybe what they didn’t see coming was an attack from the inside. There were still loopholes that the dominant users within the organizations could take advantage of. And this is where an additional layer of security within the domain of IAM called Privileged Identity Management (PIM) solutions comes into picture.

Privileged Identity Management (PIM) focuses more on who, what and which of the powerful accounts within the IT infrastructure such as the super-users, DBA users, CIO’s etc. Privileged Identity Management controls and monitors the influential users within the system. So is Privileged Identity Management solution only good to provide security? No. It makes life easy for the super-user and the CIO or CISO or CTO and subsequently the owner. How is that? Well, that is because PIM solution controls and authenticates the many users in your system, it manages passwords changing it regularly aligning with the regulatory policies for password change for you (boon for super-user/admin because he doesn’t have to go through the long tedious procedure of changing passwords manually for all the users), it restricts access to certain secure databases and systems from people who are not authorized to access them, it monitors by video and by log of all the activities that the users perform, it allows for a single sign on enabling users to only remember one password for a single entry and seamlessly access there on applications and servers the user has access to, it flags and alerts on a live dashboard monitoring tool whenever there has been a breach and lastly it ensures adherence to the compliance and regulatory procedures giving a good night’s sleep to the CISO’s and the owners. Nothing like a good night’s sleep now, is there!

Do your part, switch to cloud but ensure you have the Privileged Identity Management solutions put in place today, if you haven’t already done so.

About ARCON
ARCON is a leading technology company specializing in risk control solutions. ARCON offers a proprietary unified governance framework, which addresses risk across various technology platforms. ARCON in the last one decade has been at the forefront of innovations in risk control solutions, with its roots strongly entranced in identifying business risk across industries it is in a unique position to react with innovative solutions/products.

Learn more about us at https://www.arconnet.com

learn from it.

The financial world and the security industry have been rocked by the recent report from Kaspersky about the cyber-criminals that have stolen more than $1 Billion from global banks through cyber-attacks. The initial reports link the attacks to a multinational criminal group, and highlight the use of sophisticated malware, dubbed Carbanak.

Questions were raised in late 2013 when an ATM in Kiev, Ukraine, began dispensing money at random times, when no one had put in a card or touched a button. Security cameras show that money would be picked up by customers who appeared to be in the right place at the right time. But when Kaspersky Lab was called in to investigate, it was revealed that the ATM was part of a much-larger banking breach.

The attackers used simple techniques like phishing to trick employees into infecting their endpoints with malware. Once installed, the attackers went after the administrators in order to gain access to the machines on which financial administrators operated. After gaining access to bank’s computers through phishing schemes and other methods, they lurk for months to learn the bank’s systems, taking screen shots and even video of employees using their computers. This unusual method of hacking which rather than targeting customers for money, targeted the banks as a whole, has caused a massive stir in the banking industry.

The hackers have been active since at least the end of 2013 and infiltrated more than 100 banks in 30 countries, according to Russian security company Kaspersky Lab. The recent revelations of hundreds of millions of dollars in cybercrime targeting the financial industry, shows that criminal enterprises are alive and well, and continue to cultivate new cyber capabilities.

Protecting one’s organization from such attacks requires us to understand what the insider threat really is and how to protect one’s organization from it. From Carbanak and Anunak attacks, we believe that unprotected privileged accounts are one of the main concerns of all modern day IT security experts. One in 3 cyber breaches are caused because of unprotected and unrestricted access. We at Arcon believe that by implementing the necessary tools and infrastructure, we can manage, continuously monitor and track privileged account activities. Along with the analytics and intelligence to identify anomalous activity, organizations can protect themselves and enable a quick detection and response, making it possible to mitigate potential damage early in the attack cycle.

About ARCON
ARCON is a leading technology company specializing in risk control solutions. ARCON offers a proprietary unified governance framework, which addresses risk across various technology platforms. ARCON in the last one decade has been at the forefront of innovations in risk control solutions, with its roots strongly entranced in identifying business risk across industries it is in a unique position to react with innovative solutions/products.

Learn more about us at arconnet.com