An audit trail of a privileged session is a chronological record of events that provides basic information to trace all the activities performed during that session. Audit records of a privileged session may include what the event was, which user or application initiated the event (including IP address and device type), what operations were performed during the entire session, and the date and time of the event.
Unmonitored access and its misuse is a serious problem for most systems. Capturing all the activities of privileged users is critical to identify and prevent anomalous actions that may harm business. Organizations must document the privileges granted to users, the actions performed with such privileges, and how these actions impact their IT environment. Traditional approaches to logging user activities cannot fully meet these requirements.
Audit trails help in identifying suspicious behavior. Through real-time monitoring and automated audit logs, administrators can identify system implementation issues, operational issues, unusual or suspicious activities, and other system errors.
Various compliance standards, like HIPAA, SOX, and PCI DSS, expect organizations to monitor and capture all actions performed by privileged accounts.
Access Manager Plus’ audit trails instantly record all events around privileged account activities, login attempts, and scheduled or completed tasks. This data helps in complying with regular internal audits and forensic investigations, demonstrating who accessed what resource or files, where, when, and why.
Only an administrator can view all the actions performed by other users. You can notify users of their activities through in-product notifications. Access Manager Plus also lets you send instant email notifications to specific recipients when certain events take place.
Regulatory statutes such as HIPAA and SOX mandate proper maintenance of electronic records and require implementation of mechanisms for proper compliance and auditing. Access Manager Plus provides immutable audit logs that can be shared with auditors to demonstrate compliance.
If you use a third-party security information and event management (SIEM) tool in your organization, you can integrate Access Manager Plus with the tool to send syslog messages for the various events that occur within Access Manager Plus. You can also integrate your network management tool with Access Manager Plus to receive SNMP traps.
These tools analyze and correlate privileged access data with other event data sourced from across the enterprise, helping security teams acquire a holistic view of privileged access and gain insights into suspicious activities.
If your organization is large, the captured audit logs will naturally grow at a faster rate. You can purge audit logs that are older than a specified number of days to keep the disk space free. You can also store these logs in the local drive, and move or delete them as required.
