Cloud Security Challenges and Benefits of PAM

The Need for Cloud Security

The evolving digital landscape has shifted the way that businesses handle their operational workloads. Over the past few years, many global organizations have been resorting to the cloud to stay competitive and achieve continuous growth. The flexibility to host workloads across multiple locations, scalability, and minimal maintenance costs make cloud technology popular.

According to Gartner, enterprise IT spending on cloud technology will increase from $1.3 trillion in 2022 to $1.8 trillion by 2025. An article goes on to say that the reason for organizations’ interest in the cloud is generated by their ability to meet location-specific requirements, such as data sovereignty, low latency, and network bandwidth.

Although the cloud technology brings immense benefits to organizations, it is undeniable that the technology comes with its share of security threats. 50% of the world’s corporate data is stored in the cloud. Colossal amounts of business-critical data and infrastructure hosted on servers can lead to potential vulnerabilities and catastrophic cyber-attacks.

This blog covers a few significant cloud security challenges and discusses how a robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution can help tackle them and mitigate vulnerabilities.

Challenges with the Cloud Security

The creation of multiple local accounts on the cloud platform increases the attack surface. In addition, the level of access shared via the cloud is far more challenging to track and control using traditional perimeter security controls.
Most organizations leverage cloud instances from various service providers (multi-cloud infrastructure) along with servers hosted on-premises. This variability of environments to host the workloads can result in scattering sensitive data across networks.
The flexibility of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the recent transformation to a hybrid work model enabled users to access organizational resources on their personal devices anytime, anywhere. These user devices are often unsecured, making business-critical data unencrypted and vulnerable.
Providing unrestricted access privileges to multiple users to access the cloud environment can result in Standing These privileges negate the principles of least privileged access, which emphasizes on providing limited user access for performing tasks.

How Can PAM Help in Cloud Security?

With the proliferation of cloud usage and constantly evolving cyber threats, implementing a robust PAM solution has become essential for organizations in recent years.

Often, numerous users possess privileged access to critical data at a given point in time. While this is an excellent step towards achieving efficiency, it can also result in an increased attack surface – one of the primary reasons why implementing a robust PAM becomes more necessary than just a norm.

Here are some benefits that come with deploying a PAM solution for the cloud security:

Cloud Scalability and Transparency

A perfect cloud-architected PAM solution enables organizations to manage huge volumes of privileged access requests with ease and accuracy. It also provides strategies and policies for secured privileged access, upholding cloud security.

Just in Time (JIT) Privileged Access

Modern PAM solutions come with Just-In-Time Access capability that strategically provides elevated access to users as and when required. It operates by the creation and validation of temporary IDs that work until a pre-defined period of time. With JIT, privileged access can be assigned and de-assigned automatically.

Session Recording

Once the privileged sessions are identified and onboarded, it is also crucial to record the sessions with an automated workflow. Capable PAM solutions come with an in-built and automated session recording ability to detect and report suspicious spikes in privileged sessions.

Cloud Security Reporting and Analytics

Robust PAM solutions continuously analyze organizational security posture and provide easy-to-understand insights. Organizations can leverage these insights to take preventive and corrective measures and mitigate gaps in their security posture.

Automatic Identification and Onboarding of Privileges

PAM solutions for the cloud help with automated identification of active privileges and onboarding of new privileges after validation.

Custom Automation of Cloud Workflows

Apart from the existing built-in workflow automation for crucial tasks, most modern PAM solutions for the cloud provide the flexibility to automate new workflow creations according to cloud security requirements.

Secure What Matters with Sectona

Sectona Security Platform seamlessly integrates the elements for securing privileged access on growing attack surfaces for organizations. Explore a light, integrated approach towards privileged access management in modern Enterprise IT powered by the cloud.