Cybersecurity Series: How Can Privileged Access Management Keep Your Data Safe?

By Mike Zawisza and The Prosperoware Marketing Team

We are experiencing a rise in cyberattacks as cybercriminals and hackers prey on potential weak points in our security systems. Following major attacks like SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, and LinkedIn, there has never been a better time for your organization to reexamine its security policies.

Implementing a Privileged Access Management (PAM) strategy can help. It allows organizations to keep track of who has access to what data, minimizing the damage of a potential hack.

And that’s because the less access users have to data, the less access hackers will have if and when they enter your systems through phishing emails or other methods.

What is privileged access management and how can organizations implement it?

The weakest link in any security system is human error. Users unknowingly create cybersecurity risks within the organization by interacting with sketchy email links, saving documents in their vulnerable personal drives, and attempting to access data and projects that are irrelevant to them.

There are also other cases when users intentionally abuse their level of access, especially if their relationship with the organization is coming to an end. An example is an employee leaving the organization and downloading immense amounts of data as resources or to expose sensitive data.

Hackers capitalize on these weaknesses and use them to breach vulnerable endpoints and workstations. Once hackers get in, they can run rampant in your organization’s documents and data, stealing and deleting sensitive or intellectual property data. By the time you’ve discovered the attack, it may already be too late. Cybercriminals can go undetected for an average of before being caught.

This puts your organization on the line for millions of dollars in lost and stolen data, further regulatory penalties, and even reputational damage.

That’s why implementing Privileged Access Management should be a key step in your organization’s data protection strategy.

Privileged Access Management is a strategic approach to cybersecurity that centers around monitoring all users and their levels of access across a given workspace. PAM helps your organization apply a structured level of access where your users can only access data that is necessary to do their jobs. This does not only prevent users from accessing irrelevant data to their position, but the organization can also detect malicious activity and take action towards it.

PAM is also key in helping your organization comply with regulatory policies. When users are left unmanaged and unmonitored, your organization becomes vulnerable to breaches. This strategy enables organizations to create a more user-friendly environment to record all IT & sensitive data related activities.

It also helps simplify assurance through audit trails. As the lifecycle of projects begin and end, users will have new privileges granted, and old ones stripped, assuring that data can’t be improperly accessed .

Not only does this method of security keep unwanted outsiders out of your data, but also mitigates the risk of a malicious attack from within the organization as well.

As one can imagine, keeping this level of security requires a large number of resources and time when done manually. Sometimes, a software solution is needed to carry your organization to that extra mile.

Mitigating Data Chaos as a Foundation to Privileged Access Management

Constantly monitoring and tracking access levels of all users in your organization is a massive undertaking. It becomes even more challenging when done across collaboration systems, since data tends to be chaotic.

Solving data chaos requires consistent provisioning of any business process, for projects, matters, engagements — whatever you may call them — across systems with folder templates and standardized naming conventions. This allows end users to save data in the right place, so it’s not saved in their local drives, increasing risk. Adding rich custom metadata takes this one step further, allowing users to quickly locate data and risk management teams to understand business context, so they can apply security policies

Once data is in the right place and it’s easy to determine context, applying privileged access is a breeze. But, when done manually, this process is prone to human-error, creating extra costs. So while it’s a necessary process to protect your data, it’s one that should be automated.

Software that allows provisioning and data protection across collaboration systems is necessary. And that’s exactly what we do with CAM.

How Prosperoware Helps

Prosperoware CAM is a Software-as-a-Service platform (SaaS) for adoption and governance of collaboration systems. It allows organizations to provision, classify, protect, move, and minimize data, mitigating data chaos and reducing risks related to privacy & cybersecurity.

CAM enables organizations to create logical locations for users to place data. It provides rich custom metadata, empowering users to locate documents, and risk management teams to understand business context in order to apply the right security & data minimization policies.

CAM integrates with Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, Lists), iManage, NetDocuments, HighQ, and more to come.

Here is what CAM can do for you:

• Provisioning of workspaces, Teams, Channels, Lists, users & groups, and folders from Project Portfolio Management, CRM etc., or through a human workflow using readily available templates.
• Rich, custom metadata for project or document context.
• Unified project directory for content location for end users and risk management teams.
• Provision automatically or on-demand internal & external users, manage permissions across collaboration systems, and integrate with leading ethical wall systems.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with activity monitoring and bulk security & metadata changes.
• Data protection by creating a separate archive of documents to access in case of incidents.
• Minimize data by setting automatic data disposition policies or apply litigation hold.