PAM as a service is relatively new and must still evolve to meet the needs and demands of every organization. However, for now, it provides all the benefits of an on-premise installation on the cloud. It helps protect your most sensitive accounts in a cost-effective and flexible manner. It is also gaining more attention in the market and while it has its advantages, it also comes with its set of challenges. Let’s discuss some of those below.
Advantages
- Reduced costs: PAM cloud vendors offer pricing models that allow you to pay based on the services you need. This leads to reduced cost because infrastructure is maintained by the vendor eliminating the significant initial investment.
- Universal accessibility: With this feature you can manage cloud based PAM solutions from any location with an internet connection.
- High availability: High availability is taken care of by the vendor by eliminating single points of failure and ensuring continuous operation.
- Rapid Deployment: “PAM on Cloud” set up is simple and also offers rapid time to value. With cloud PAM solutions you may get results straight away after logging in to the browser-based console.
- Automatic updates: Updates are automatic which means no human resources are required, and also advantage of having the latest feature and functionalities.
- Greater stability: PAM on cloud provides high scalability which gives the customers, freedom to access more or fewer services and applications without slowing down.
Challenges
- Migrations: PAM migration to the cloud creates some unique challenges which should be solved in a strategic way.
- Service failure: A challenge clients face while using the SaaS model for PAM is – if the service is down they will not have access to privileged accounts.
- Requirement of Components: To make PAM cloud work you will need components inside your environment which will access the internet, this inherently poses a risk of compromising your sensitive data that may lead to security breaches.
- Infrastructure: Another challenge is that clients have no control over the backend infrastructure and have to reach out to vendors if they are any slowdowns.
While SaaS PAM has not been there for a long time, the flexibility it offers is making clients rethink if they want PAM on-prem. This is accentuated by the fact that every organization today is using the cloud in one or the other way, hence why not PAM.
SecurDI has certified professionals who can help you in providing secure PAM solutions.We help plan, implement and design the PAM infrastructure which meets your requirements and protects your sensitive accounts no matter the model you go for.
– Authored by Nanda Kishore