Introduction to Access Manager Plus
A Seamless Privileged Session Management (PSM) Solution
What is a Privileged Session?
Unlike most sessions that are run by normal unprivileged users, there are sessions driven by privileged user accounts, called as privileged sessions. IT infrastructure, application servers, and many other secure online resources require such sessions. Such privileged user accounts may belong to system administrators, developers, application owners, and other users and processes that operate with system elevated privileges to perform sensitive operations.
What is Privileged Access?
Any access to a computer system with higher access rights such as root access, Administrator access, or access to service accounts is called Privileged access. Also, access to any server command line is considered privileged access, as maximum enterprises restrict their users to run applications only through their user interface.
Privileged Account and Privileged User
A privileged account is a user account with higher privileges than normal accounts. A privileged account may be an operating system account with command-line access or an application account with elevated privileges, e.g., accounts that are capable of altering the configuration of an application. A privileged user is a user with an elevated access to an organization's information systems than other users. Mostly, they have access to multiple privileged accounts.
Challenges in Remote Session Management
You will have to work with complex networks, cloud services, and user needs while configuring remote sessions. Managing and securing becomes more challenging when multiple sessions using different connection protocols and a variety of privileged accounts are active in parallel.
Also, unlike most sessions that involve connections of normal, unprivileged users, the IT infrastructure, holding application servers and other online resources, involve frequent sessions by privileged users such as system administrators, developers, application owners, etc., and also processes that operate with system-elevated privileges. Such privileged users and processes in the corporate environment, including administrators who maintain the corporate IT and outsourced expert consultants accessing servers remotely, are highly trusted users who are bound to access the designated resources with elevated system privileges and hence must conform to the overall corporate security policy.
Most of the time, users with privileged access are members of the organization. They may be system administrators, database administrators, developers, architects, application owners, IT managers, etc., who already have access to the organization and its systems. Statistics say that most cyber crimes are committed by or at least aided by such members. Hence, it is essential to control and keep an eye on privileged access to defeat insider risk.
Why Access Manager Plus?
Access Manager Plus is a constructive platform to achieve secure remote access management and session governance. It allows you to establish privileged sessions to underlying systems (Windows and Linux) via a centralized console; monitor, join, record or terminate sessions effectively.
It allows you to define roles for users and grant required privileges or access rights for those roles. It also allows you to distribute the user information and access grants to all devices and systems that enforce access rights in the organization. Furthermore, it lets you monitor and assess the privileged users' activities to detect anomalies.
On the whole, Access Manager Plus provides real-time monitoring and control of access and sessions of all privileged users, to counteract malicious activities.
Key Benefits of Access Manager Plus
- Centralized console to monitor, record and control concurrent remote sessions, thereby enhancing the overall usability.
- Ability to toggle between multiple active connections from a central console, thus improving workflow and productivity.
- Proficiency to join live sessions to watch user activity, collaborate, assist with troubleshooting, or simply monitor usage to ensure compliance and security standards.
- Capability to record and playback privileged sessions and create a full audit trail of events, thus conforming to regulatory compliance.
- Ability to terminate active sessions and curb further proceedings, when a foul activity is suspected.
- Eliminates the need for password vaulting, or new software or agents on servers or clients, thus facilitating speed deployment and reducing overhead.