Securing and Monitoring Privileged Access in the Cloud

By Clango

Cloud adoption continues to increase. The cloud market is quickly maturing, and more organizations are moving critical workloads and data into the cloud. In fact, a 451 Research report found that 85 percent of enterprises have sensitive data in the cloud, up from 54 percent the prior year. However, many organizations aren’t doing enough to secure their cloud resources.

This often stems from a misunderstanding of the shared responsibility model of cloud security. Organizations think all security responsibilities lie with the cloud service provider, but that’s not the case. The service provider’s job is to secure the infrastructure within the cloud data center. It’s the customer’s job to secure the data and applications within that infrastructure.

Unfortunately, many organizations have limited visibility into cloud services and the users who access them. An IT team might not even have oversight of cloud administrators and privileged business users who have elevated rights to sensitive cloud platforms and applications. When privileged cloud users operate outside corporate security, they can expose an entire organization to serious risks. An external attacker or malicious insider who is able to hijack privileged cloud credentials could shut down cloud environments, compromise web applications, steal sensitive data, and more.

Cloud access security brokers (CASBs) have emerged to help organizations gain greater visibility and control and extend their security policies to the cloud. CASBs enable IT teams to identify suspicious user activity and unusual data access and movement. Best-in-class CASBs also secure privileged passwords and monitor privileged account activity. However, CASBs can complicate management and the user experience.

CyberArk offers a better approach. The new Privileged Session Manager for Cloud extends the privileged access session isolation, monitoring, and control of the CyberArk platform to common cloud services and web applications. Key features include:

• Transparent access and faster connections. A completely transparent user logon process establishes secure connections to cloud platforms and web applications three times faster than traditional session management solutions.
• Isolated privileged sessions in the cloud. Cloud administrator and privileged business user sessions are isolated, helping to ensure that privileged credentials are never revealed and are used only to establish secure sessions.
• Privileged session monitoring. The solution maintains detailed audits of all privileged user activities within cloud platforms and web applications to support regulatory compliance and speed incident response.
• Privileged session risk scoring. Comprehensive risk scoring into risky operations performed by individual privileged users is enabled through a combination of powerful statistical, deterministic algorithms, machine learning, and behavioral analytics.
• Support for major cloud platforms and web applications. The new offering will initially support major Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service offerings and leading social media applications.

CyberArk Privileged Session Manager for Cloud will be available as part of the CyberArk Privileged Access Security Solution v9.6 and above, at no additional cost for customers with Core Privileged Access Security user licenses.