The Best Privileged Access Management Tools

Cybersecurity is a multi-layered process that includes many strategies and tools to protect the varying aspects of an organization's operations. One such strategy is Privileged Access Management (PAM).

In this article, we'll discuss the different types of user accounts and the risks associated with them. Following this, we'll talk about PAM and the different tools that make it easy to implement PAM within an organization.

Here is our list of the top privileged access management tools:

1. ManageEngine PAM360 – EDITOR’S CHOICE A comprehensive privileged access management (PAM) solution designed to secure, monitor, and control privileged user accounts. It offers password management, session monitoring, and risk analytics to protect critical IT infrastructure and sensitive data. Runs on Windows Server. Access a 30-day free trial.
2. JumpCloud A secure and efficient cloud-based platform to provision/de-provision resources, manage user access, onboard and offboard employees, and generate the reports you need for auditing and compliance.
3. Visulox A privileged access management platform for transparent security. It comes with a centralized dashboard for managing access and resource provisioning across your IT and IoT systems, with no changes required on servers and client applications.
4. CyberArk A comprehensive solution to safeguard your organization's assets and prevent malicious access to resources.
5. BeyondTrust PAM This platform secures privileges and manages access for your entire organization. With BeyondTrust, managing, auditing, and monitoring access are quick and efficient.
6. ManageEngine Password Pro This service from ManageEngine is a secure vault for storing your privileged account passwords and sensitive documents for streamlined access and security.

Types of User Accounts

All user accounts are not the same. They can be broadly divided into privileged and non-privileged accounts. A key difference is that privileged accounts can change configurations, bypass security settings, override existing settings, provision systems, and more. Non-privileged accounts don't have such overarching rights and can be used only within the existing configuration.

Non-Privileged Accounts

Non-privileged accounts are of two types:

• Standard user accounts Users can access a network's resources, but can't change them.
• Guest accounts Highly restrictive and often limited to basic access. There could also be time limits for guest accounts.

Privileged Accounts

Privileged accounts are of the following types:

• Superuser account This account offers unrestricted privileges to account holders, and is often called the admin or root account.
• Domain admin account This is a Windows user account that can add, edit, and delete user permissions in the Active Directory.
• Local admin account With this account, a user can make changes to the local Windows machine only.
• Emergency account Used during a crisis or disaster and allows the user to bypass all security restrictions.

Often, the type of privileged accounts granted to users depends on the role and designation of employees. Many times, these privileged accounts can go unmanaged, especially if they are over-provisioned or not monitored for activity. This is where Privileged Access Management (PAM) becomes essential.

What's Privileged Access Management (PAM)?

As we saw earlier, privileged accounts have overarching access to resources. This could create security gaps in the organization, especially when they are not monitored. Your sensitive data can be compromised due to misuse of privileged accounts, poor hygiene practices, and more.

A good way to monitor privileged accounts is through automated platforms, as they remove manual errors and guesswork from PAM.

The Best Privileged Access Management Tools

Let's take a detailed look at each of these tools.

1. ManageEngine PAM360 – FREE TRIAL

ManageEngine PAM360 is a privileged access management (PAM) solution designed to secure, control, and monitor privileged accounts across IT environments. It offers automated password management, real-time session monitoring, just-in-time access, and detailed audit trails to minimize security risks and ensure compliance.

Key Features:

• Automated Password Management: PAM360 offers automated password management that securely stores, rotates, and manages privileged account credentials. It ensures that passwords are automatically rotated at predefined intervals, minimizing the risk of compromise due to stale or weak credentials. The tool provides password vaulting with strong encryption, allowing only authorized users to access privileged credentials when needed.
• Privileged Session Monitoring: PAM360 provides real-time monitoring of privileged sessions, giving administrators visibility into who is accessing critical systems and what actions they are performing. It allows live session tracking, recording, and playback for auditing purposes. This feature helps in detecting suspicious activities early and supports forensic investigations by offering detailed session logs and reports.
• Just-in-Time Privileged Access: The Just-in-Time access feature grants users temporary privileged access to critical systems only when needed, reducing the attack surface. By providing limited-time access based on user roles and tasks, PAM360 ensures that no unused or over-provisioned privileges remain active, enhancing overall security while maintaining flexibility for IT operations.
• Comprehensive Audit Trails: PAM360 creates detailed audit trails of all privileged access and activity across the network. It logs every action taken by users during their sessions, providing a full historical record for auditing and compliance purposes. These records help organizations meet regulatory requirements and provide insights into potential security breaches or policy violations.
• Third-Party Vendor Access Management: PAM360 enables secure and controlled access for third-party vendors, ensuring that external users can access only specific systems or applications for a limited time. By managing and monitoring vendor access, PAM360 reduces the risk of third-party security threats and ensures that vendors adhere to strict security protocols when interacting with sensitive resources.

This system is delivered as a software package for Windows Server. You can assess the system by accessing a 30-day free trial.

2. JumpCloud

JumpCloud streamlines identity, access, and device management. Essentially, it gives administrators the option to see and manage all privileged accounts through a single pane, so they can identify security blind spots easily.

Keys Features:

• Centralizes User Management: A highlight of JumpCloud is that it centralizes user management, and provides a single view of your resources' usage and access. Such centralized management provides complete visibility into who accesses what resources, how your resources are used, etc. In turn, it helps your organization to streamline resource usage and user access through a single dashboard.
• Works Across Platforms: JumpCloud works well across Windows, macOS, Linux, on-premises applications, cloud-based applications, different networks, and infrastructure to streamline access across all of them. More importantly, its centralized user interface acts as a single point of view for managing resources across all these platforms.
• Easy Provisioning: One of the bottlenecks of privileged access is resource provisioning. JumpCloud eases this process as you can provision or de-provision resources using both Single Sign-On (SSO) or Just In Time (JIT) provisioning. Such flexibility ensures that your employees always have the resources they need to maintain their productivity.
• In-depth Insights: JumpCloud generates detailed reports to help with internal auditing and compliance with leading standards. Also, its built-in monitoring and logging capabilities help to quickly identify security vulnerabilities and resource wastage, so you can plug them right away.
• Efficient Employee Management: With JumpCloud, you can quickly onboard and offboard employees depending on their work status. Its user-based and group-based access control ensures that you can quickly onboard and provision resources when new employees join your organization. Likewise, you can suspend accounts and get back their resources when employees leave organizations while keeping confidential data secure.

In all, JumpCloud is a secure and simple way to manage your users and their resource access and usage within your organization.

Try JumpCloud for free.

3. Visulox

Visulox Privileged Access Management from Germany-based Amitego provides a transparent and customized way to manage access within your organization. It provides a centralized way to stay on top of all IT and IoT systems accesses in a simple and hassle-free way.

Key Features:

• JIT Access: Privileged Access Management creates many security gaps and blind spots because of uncontrolled resource provisioning. Visulox helps you to avoid this trap by providing a Just In Time (JIT) provisioning access, where access to a resource is provided only when needed and for a specified duration only. You can define the specification and access policies for each user account based on their account type, role, and department, and no access will be given outside these specifications.
• Simplifies User Management: Visulox greatly simplifies user management across IT and IoT systems. Your admin team can have complete visibility into all operations, resources, and access through a centralized dashboard. Also, Visulox offers the option of secure desktop sharing to revoke authorizations, support remote teams, and more.
• Scalable and Flexible: Visulox is highly scalable and meets the growing needs of your organization, as more endpoints and users are added to the system. Its flexible licensing plans also enable you to meet the fluctuations in business demand.
• Zero Changes: As Visulox sits between the users and your applications and systems, it interacts with both entities seamlessly. This translates to zero changes to your servers or applications. Also, Visulox supports many protocols like RDP, SSH, Telnet, etc., to easily manage privileged access.

Overall, Visulox is a simple and hassle-free privileged access management tool that works well across your IT and IoT systems.

Click here for a demo.

4. CyberArk

CyberArk is a privileged access manager that safeguards your organization's assets and streamlines access to them. It reduces risks by detecting threats in real-time while enhancing productivity by providing access to appropriate resources.

Key Features:

• Easily Manage Privileged Credentials: CyberArk enables you to automatically discover privileged credentials and access by both human and non-human entities, and in turn, this eliminates the security blind spots that come with privileged access. Moreover, you can set policies for access and the same will be implemented across the entire system.
• Enables Strong Passwords: With CyberArk, you can enforce password policies for privileged users. You can set the complexity, frequency of change, rotations, and more. It even comes with automated password suggestions and rotations to strengthen security and mitigate security risks.
• Multiple Deployments: You can deploy CyberArk on the cloud or on-premises. If you go for a SaaS deployment, CyberArk handles all the updates and patches and offers a 99.99% SLA for uptime. Further, it's also a secure option that's compliant with the SOC 2 security standard. In a self-hosted deployment model, you can deploy CyberArk in your data center or on your public/private cloud. You can even do a multi-region deployment to meet your organization's needs.
• Integrations: CyberArk integrates well with many leading platforms and services today. Some examples of its integrations are CrowdStrike, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, SailPoint, and more.

In all, CyberArk is a comprehensive privileged access management platform that ensures security while ensuring productivity and seamless access to the required resources.

Click here to request a demo.

5. BeyondTrust Privileged Password Management

BeyondTrust offers a slew of tools geared toward your organization's security, and one of them is Privileged Password Management. With this service, you can discover, audit, monitor, and manage any kind of privileged account and credential. You can even combine this offering with BeyondTrust's Password Safe feature for comprehensive protection.

Key Features:

• Continuous Monitoring: BeyondTrust automatically discovers and manages privileged accounts, so there are no more unknown accounts that have wide-arching access. With this tool, you can easily onboard and offboard privileged accounts quickly and efficiently.
• Session Recording: The session recording feature ensures that you have complete visibility into different privileged account users and their activities in your network. This recording happens in real-time, and undoubtedly, brings down the chances of insider attacks and abuse of privileged accesses.
• Threat Analytics: The above-mentioned session recording and continuous monitoring bring to light the security vulnerabilities within your organization. Using this information, BeyondTrust generates threat analytics and capacity planning reports to help you make informed decisions when it comes to granting and revoking privileged access.
• Password Management: You can integrate with Password Safe and DevOps Secrets Safe, two other services offered by BeyondTrust, to manage your privileged user account passwords. You can even formulate and implement appropriate password policies for greater protection.

Overall, BeyondTrust's PAM provides complete visibility into the access patterns and behavior of privileged user accounts in your organization. More importantly, you can combine it with related services for comprehensive protection.

Click here to watch a demo of BeyondTrust's products.

6. ManageEngine Password Pro

ManageEngine Password Pro is an enterprise password manager for managing privileged identities, passwords, sensitive documents, and more. This service is a secret vault containing all the critical information, and you can streamline access to this vault.

Key Features:

• Store and Organize Passwords: You can easily store and organize passwords in your secure vault. The advantage of this service is you eliminate password fatigue and the security issues that come with reusing passwords on privileged accounts. More importantly, you can monitor access to this vault, which can be far more efficient, than monitoring access across the entire organization.
• JIT Sharing: You can securely share the credentials of privileged user accounts with your organization's employees on a need basis. You can even set access for a limited time, depending on the roles and responsibilities of the users. This way, no one will permanently have access to these credentials and your IT admins will also have greater control over who accesses what accounts.
• Video Recording and Auditing: Another important feature of ManageEngine Password Pro is its video recording and auditing capabilities. This feature provides complete visibility and control over privileged user accounts and can eliminate unknown and undocumented accesses. More importantly, such auditing can also help your organization to comply with many leading security standards.
• Control and Reset: Your IT admins are always in control over privileged accounts and can streamline their usage based on the roles and responsibilities of employees. Such control reduces the chances of security vulnerabilities due to unmonitored privileged accounts. Furthermore, IT admins can reset the passwords of different resources to boost security.

In all, ManageEngine Password Pro is a complete platform for seamlessly managing privileged user accounts in your organization. Its simplicity and visibility are unmatched and can save a ton of time and effort for your employees.

Thus, these are some of the best-privileged access management tools. All these tools provide the control and visibility you need through different options. Some tools even come with additional features to boost the overall security of your organization. Before choosing a tool, make sure to evaluate it against your business objectives, compliance requirements, and the nature of your networks and operations.

Bottom Line

To conclude, user accounts within any organization can have a wide range of privileges and accesses. Broadly speaking, privileged accounts are those accounts that have comprehensive access to many of your organization's resources. Unfortunately, such unfettered access can also create security vulnerabilities, as there's always a possibility for the misuse of these privileges. To avoid such security gaps and to ensure that the right people have the right privileges, leverage one of the privileged access management tools we discussed in this article. Picking the appropriate tool can provide the control and visibility you need to ensure that the privileged accounts are used for their intended purpose.

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