One of the most debated subjects on the market is Digital Transformation, now boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic. We heard about the adoption of technologies to transform business processes not only during “lives”, but also in articles, conferences, and even family gatherings. In addition to the migration to distributed models, the home office, and new working tools, the digital transformation has also resulted in the modernization of communication channels with customers.

The strategic plans of organizations and projects considered to be of low priority had to be revised; medium and long-term goals had to be accelerated to take place in a few weeks; also, strategies never thought of have been implemented in the short term. Organizations and their leaders realized that if they did not implement the required changes, business continuity would be affected. So much so that, according to the Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, 82% of CEOs have some initiative related to digital transformation, in comparison with 62% in 2018.

In these times of high competitiveness, one of the greatest advantages offered by organizations is the relationship approach with customers. More and more people in companies consider their responses during the entire consumption process, from identifying the purchase need to after-sales.

Gartner itself brings what they call the Total Experience as one of the 10 strategic technology trends for 2021. Total Experience combines multi-experience, Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience, and User Experience (UX) to transform business results. The goal, according to Gartner, is to improve the overall experience, in which all these areas intercede, from technology for employees to consumers and users.

Taking into account that employees are giving more value to the user experience with the products and solutions available on the market, Gartner launched Peer Insights, so that users could share their impressions and opinions about IT suppliers.

Gartner Peer Insights is a free evaluation and review platform for Technology solutions and services, covering more than 300 markets, aligned with the categories from the Magic Quadrant and Market Guide reports, including 3,000 suppliers. Each review submitted by users is verified by the Gartner team to ensure that their perceptions and views at each of the different stages of the purchase process are completely authentic. And to ensure that reviews are impartial, Gartner does not allow vendors to offer any financial incentives to users who evaluate their products or services. However, Gartner itself offers gift cards and does not prohibit vendors from doing so either. It is important to note that the value of gift cards should not exceed USD 25.

Each of the reviews submitted by users is verified in a process composed of several steps, including the definition of the user and organization profile, in addition to their role and responsibilities. This verification, which usually takes a few days, is done based on the inspection of the verified corporate email and LinkedIn profile. Additionally, the user cannot be an employee, consultant, reseller, or competitor of the vendor and product to be evaluated.

After submission, user reviews are assessed to determine whether they meet Gartner Peer Insights requirements related to context, quality, and relevance.

Some characteristics expected by Gartner are:

• Comments consistent with the respective scores.
• Variance of scores in the review, considering it unlikely that a user will have the same score for all aspects of a product or service.
• Scores are logically consistent, taking into account general and specific scores.
• Demonstration of experience in relation to the product or service being reviewed.

The reviews must also be authored by the user, with generic comments, and must not contain data that allow the user to be identified. Comparisons with competitors and financial data are not allowed either.

It is important to emphasize that, after the review is published, personal data of users, such as the name of the user or organization, are not displayed, only the industry in which the company operates and its respective size, geographic region, and revenue data.

Gartner recognizes the importance of user insights, so much so that it included them in the methodologies for evaluating the Magic Quadrant processes in order to assist customers in their effective decisions in a specific market. For vendors, Gartner Peer Insights allows them to use feedback from their consumers to reinforce their strengths, display quotes from customers, and highlight their position in the market.

For this, Gartner offers resources through the Technology Provider Tools portal that can be used to encourage customers to send their reviews, including best practices, customer communication templates, and tools. These resources allow providers to generate their links for requesting reviews and obtain indicators for measuring the success in using the tool, for example.

By using a platform like Gartner Peer Insights and its resources, it is possible to offer the user a free environment to evaluate their impressions and, thus, help others to choose IT products and services. As for vendors and providers, the platform allows them to check the general satisfaction towards what they offer to the market, in addition to being able to offer upselling, acquisition of other products and services of the company, and even refer them to others. The practical result of this is, in addition to more satisfied customers, a better perception of these products and services on the market, which leads to an increase in revenues and customers. In short: this is one of the secrets to the success of any organization.

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is formed by a set of cybersecurity strategies and technologies to exercise control over privileged access and permissions for users, accounts, processes, and systems in a technological environment.

A PAM is an ideal solution for preventing and mitigating damage resulting from external attacks, as well as from the neglect of internal employees and other insider threats against privileged credentials, specifically.

Although PAM encompasses many strategies, the main goal of the solution is to apply the concept of least privilege, which concerns the restriction of access rights and permissions for users, accounts, applications, systems, devices, and computing processes to the absolute minimum access required for them to perform their daily activities.

For this reason, PAM is considered by many experts and technologists to be one of the most important cybersecurity solutions for reducing cyber risks and obtaining a relevant security return on investment (ROI).

In today’s article, we explore the main features of a PAM solution and clarify some of the goals of this technology. Keep reading it and find out more about the PAM features.

PAM x IAM

PAM is generally related within a broader scope of Identity and Access Management (IAM).

However, IAM controls provide identity authentication to ensure that a legitimate user has the correct access. Meanwhile, PAM offers visibility, management, and auditing in a detailed way about privileged identities and activities.

Together, PAM and IAM provide refined control, visibility, and auditing capabilities over all existing credentials and privileges in a systemic environment.

Here, we also talk about the main features of a PAM solution and its benefits. If you want to learn more about IAM and how this solution complements PAM, read our article entitled “xxxxx”.

Features of a PAM solution

Privileged access or privileged account is a term used to designate access or special skills above and beyond that of a default user. Privileged access allows organizations to protect their infrastructure and applications, manage businesses efficiently, and maintain the confidentiality of sensitive data and critical infrastructure.

Privileged access can be associated with human users, as well as non-human users, such as applications and machine identities.

Thus, PAM is a solution for managing these privileged accesses. Its main goal is protecting and controlling the use of impersonal and high-privilege credentials, providing secure storage, segregation of access, and full use traceability.

To perform this management of credentials, the PAM solution uses the configuration of Access Groups to define the administrator users who will be allowed to use the password for physical access, and the group of users who can use the remote access offered by the solution to access a target device or system.

All cases may respect approval workflows and validation of explanations provided by the requesting user.

In addition to these basic functions, we present below other possibilities for PAM solutions.

• Emergency Accounts: Provide users with administrator access to secure systems in case of an emergency. Access to these accounts requires the approval of the system manager for security reasons. This is usually a manual process that requires security measures.
• Local administrative account management: shared accounts that provide administrator access to the localhost or a session only. These local accounts are routinely used by IT staff for maintenance on workstations and servers, network devices, and other internal systems.
• Application Account Management: These accounts are used by applications to access databases, perform tasks, run scripts, or provide access to other applications. These privileged accounts often have access to sensitive confidential information within applications and databases.
• Active Directory Integration: A challenge to protect, to say the least, passwords can be even more challenging if changes need to be made, as they require synchronization between various systems and applications.
• Service Account Management: Local or domain accounts used by an application or service to interact with the operating system. In some cases, these service accounts have administrative privileges on domains, depending on the requirements of the application for which they are used.
• Domain Administrative Account Management: super administrators who have privileged access to all workstations and servers within the organization’s domain and provide the widest access over the network. Because they have access to administrative accounts, they are a constant target for hackers.
• Privileged User Account Management: These are users who receive administrative privileges for the systems. Privileged user accounts are one of the most common forms of account access granted in a corporate domain, allowing users to have administrator rights, for example, on their local desktops or on the systems they manage. These accounts often have unique and complex passwords, but most of the time, they are only protected by the passwords.

The more privileges and access a user, account, or process accumulates, the greater the potential for abuse, exploitation, or error. The implementation of privilege management not only minimizes the potential for a security breach to occur, but also helps to limit the scope of one if it occurs.

Benefits of a PAM solution

A counterpoint between PAM and other types of security technologies is that PAM covers various links in the cyberattack chain, protecting against external attacks and insider threats.

PAM provides several key benefits, including:

• Reduced Infection and Malware Spread: Many varieties of malware need elevated privileges for installation or execution. Removing excessive privileges, such as applying company-wide least privilege principles, can prevent malware from establishing itself or reducing its spread if it occurs.
• Operational Performance: restricting privileges to the minimum range of processes to perform an authorized activity reduces the chance of incompatibility problems between applications or systems, in addition to helping reduce the risk of downtime.
• Compliance: By restricting the privileged activities that can be performed, PAM helps to create a less complex and therefore more friendly environment for audits.

Also, many compliance regulations (including HIPAA, PCI DSS, FDDC, Government Connect, FISMA, and SOX) and data protection laws (such as GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA) require organizations to apply least privilege access policies to ensure adequate data management and system security.

When used to manage privileged access on organizational systems and platforms that store or protect the integrity of sensitive data, senhasegura provides a centralized access point for critical systems. Its features allow strengthening the access control, limiting the user access only to what was previously authorized, respecting the principle of least privilege.