What is Privileged Identity Management (PIM)?

Gaining control of identities related to people as well as machines is a challenge for many organizations. You need to know who your users are and what they do. If you experience a security incident, you must be able to reverse engineer who did what to meet compliance requirements and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is one of many security solutions that help organizations create, manage, and secure digital identities.

What is Privileged Identity Management (PIM)?

Privileged identity management is the process companies use to manage which privileged users – including human users and machine users – have access to which resources.

PIM security policies often focus on controlling users with elevated permissions to change settings, provision or de-provision access, and make other significant changes without formal oversight. Some companies use PIM solutions to monitor user behavior and distributed access to prevent admins from having too many permissions.

PIM focuses on resource management and defining which roles or attributes determine that a user gains access to particular resources. For example, determining which resources a new employee needs access to during onboarding is a PIM-related policy.

Privileged Identity Management Benefits

Here are the most important advantages of PIM:

• Facilitates accessibility: PIM simplifies the process of granting and using access privileges. Additionally, it makes it easier for users with privileges to restore access in the event that they forget their credentials.
• Enhances security: When using PIM, you can check who currently has access and who has had it in the past, as well as when their access started and stopped. Additionally, you can use it to determine which users should get access in the future.
• Keeps up with regulatory compliance: Guidelines like those imposed by regulatory compliance regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA, specify that only certain groups of people are granted access to confidential information of various types. By using PIM, you can ensure that you are adhering to these requirements while also creating reports that demonstrate your compliance.
• Lowers the cost of IT and auditing: You don’t need to manually set up each user’s access permissions when you have a predefined framework and set of access policies. You can also generate reports for auditors in a matter of seconds.
• Addresses risks associated with active accounts that are not used: Without PIM in place, cybercriminals could effortlessly exploit an account that had been given access but had subsequently remained inactive. Privileged Identity Management makes sure that access is restricted for these accounts.

Why is PIM important for enterprises?

These days, enterprise IT departments face the challenge of providing granular access to corporate resources. There is a lack of contextual information about users and requesters of data, which is a significant factor to consider before granting data privileges.

Privileged identities are omnipresent in any IT environment. IT admins, privileged users, third-party contractors, vendors, engineering teams—everyone needs access to privileged accounts and credentials to perform business-sensitive operations. However, higher privileges come with greater security risks, if these identities are not secured with an appropriate access control strategy. Lax management of privileged identities could present an ideal opportunity for attacks to break into an organization’s security perimeters and navigate through business-sensitive information without leaving any trace. Further, if IT teams do not have a track record of what their employees are doing with their privileges, or how privileged accounts are being used, any malicious insider can exploit their privileges and compromise business data for personal gains.

The success of any business depends on the privacy and accuracy of the data it processes. Therefore, managing and controlling access to data and enterprise assets should be paramount for any organization. Likewise, to avoid any penalties or lawsuits due to data breaches, organizations must ensure a streamlined workflow when it comes to authenticating access to their data.

That being said, privileged identity management (PIM) solutions are designed to centralize, control, track, and secure access to privileged accounts and identities. This will give IT teams complete control and visibility over their privileged assets, resources, and identities. PIM tools can also provide actionable insights for staying compliant with regulatory standards.

How to implement Privileged Identity Management?

• Create a policy that specifies how super user accounts will be managed and what the account holders should and should not be able to do.
• Develop a management model that identifies a responsible party to ensure that the above policies are followed.
• Inventory privileged accounts to determine how extensive the population is and to identify them.
• Establish tools and processes for management, such as provisioning tools or specialized PIM products.

PIM vs. PAM vs. IAM Are the same?​

PIM and PAM are both parts of identity and access management (IAM), which is a broader term for keeping track of, protecting, and keeping an eye on the identities of an organization. PAM and PIM, however, serve a crucial role in managing and safeguarding privileged identities. Let’s define each of these terms to better grasp the distinction:

• IAM: IAM is a security framework made up of unique rules, measures, and approaches that make it easier to manage digital organizational identities. IAM is a method that IT administrators use to control who can get into their company’s databases, assets, networks, applications, and other resources.
• PAM: Creating an access control framework to safeguard, manage, watch over, and regulate privileged access channels and activities across the company is the focus of PAM, a type of IAM.
• PIM: PIM is a subclass of PAM that offers important security controls and policies to manage and protect privileged identities, which give access to sensitive information. Service accounts, usernames, passwords, SSH keys, digital certificates, and other similar things are all types of privileged identities.

To put it into perspective, IAM includes all users, systems, resources, and assets and addresses the wider access patterns across all corporate verticals. On the other hand, PIM and PAM deal with how privileged systems and resources can be accessed.

Conclusion

Privileged Identity Management is the most effective method for managing superuser accounts across an organization. C-level executives and senior management may also have administrative privileges and access to confidential data. To prevent breaches, specific privileges, and access need careful monitoring and the appropriate restrictions in place. PIM ensures that each user has a specific distribution of identity and rights, guaranteeing that they can only access data within the scope of their permissions and only conduct certain actions.