Are you a business owner in Africa and wondering why your business needs PAM? Let’s face it, more businesses are experiencing data breaches today than any time before now in history.
With data breaches and cyber attacks on the rise, businesses, especially those domiciled in Africa, must step up their cybersecurity game. According to Dell, 90% of African businesses neglect cybersecurity protocol. IBM also reported earlier this year that the cost of data breaches in SA surged by 73% in the last 8 years.
One way to protect your organization, stakeholders, and data systems from hackers and other forms of cybersecurity risks is through Privileged Access Management. This post will show you five reasons why your business needs PAM.
What is PAM?
PAM is an acronym for Privileged Access Management. It is a strategy that allows you to control access to your organization’s systems, data, and accounts. This strategy allows you to control the rights of those who have access, mostly administrators.
PAM allows your business to maintain entire visibility and control over your critical assets. With a robust solution like BeyondTrust or ManageEngine, you can monitor and audit the activities of all privileged users.
The accounts under PAM are known as Privileged Accounts. They are created for and managed by administrators. These administrators carry out certain specific operations on these accounts, such as altering network settings, controlling user access, and installing required software solutions.
Reasons Why Your Business Needs PAM
You now have a basic understanding of privileged access management. Now, you need to find out why your business needs PAM. Here are five important reasons:
Protection from internal and external threats
At every point, your organization’s systems are at risk of internal or external threats. There is always the possibility of someone within your system being careless with their passwords or system access. This leaves you vulnerable to external threats.
There are also external attackers seeking administrative privileges to hack your systems. You cannot leave anything to chance. PAM solutions protect your brand from such threats and give you maximum control over your systems.
Effective access control
Most times, business owners are tempted that their IT administrators know it all. However, many of these administrators are oblivious to the possible risks that their systems are exposed to. You cannot fully trust that your personnel will do the right thing. This is why you need a strong PAM solution.
With an effective PAM solution, you can easily monitor access controls and audit them. This will help you ensure that all users follow your PAM policies. By doing this, you can protect your organization’s data and that of your stakeholders. A Privileged Access Management solution is supposed to help you oversee each user’s account, maintain inventory, and monitor the activities on the accounts.
Mitigating risks and automating response
One of the core characteristics of PAM systems is automation. Through this, your business can mitigate any potential risks while reducing your IT team’s administrative burden.
PAM systems help to manage access, sessions, and passwords on behalf of administrators. Identifying flaws becomes easy with automated responses and processes like multi-factor authentication, session recording, system audits, and automated password rotations. This way, you can attack and solve a cybersecurity issue or risk before it even occurs.
Reduction in IT costs and increment in ROI
It is normal for businesses like yours to evaluate their IT systems and make changes periodically where necessary. Such evaluations can result in reconfigurations, patch deployment, and several unintended effects. Unfortunately, many of these changes may not yield the desired outcomes, thus wasting funds.
With a PAM in place, you are able to contain the scope of your privileged accounts, administrators, and users. This means you can drastically reduce IT costs and channel unused funds into other productive ventures. By infusing capital into other productive means, you inevitably increase ROI.
Compliance requirements
Finally, one of the key compliance requirements for businesses globally is authentication and auditability of access. You can hardly do business in many parts of the world without having established systems to handle both. While this is not so popular in Africa, we are getting there.
With an investment in PAM, your business can monitor users’ activities over your network. This means that you can comply with key policies, regulations, and mandates, not just in Africa but across the world. The benefit here is that you have the opportunity to expand your business beyond the frontiers of Africa to the rest of the globe.
Conclusion
A strong PAM gives your IT administrative team better control over your organization’s systems. This post has shown you five reasons why your business needs PAM. Getting the right Privileged Access Management Solution can be tricky, especially if you have no experience. Support Link Technologies has over ten years of experience providing cybersecurity solutions to businesses like yours. We recommend two PAM solutions, BeyondTrust and ManageEngine. Send us an email today at info@supportlinktech.com, and we will help you get started.