Are you using the cloud or thinking about transitioning? Undoubtedly, multi-cloud and hybrid environments offer numerous benefits for organizations. However, the cloud's flexibility, scalability, and efficiency come with significant risk — an expanded attack surface. The decentralization that comes with utilizing multi-cloud environments can also lead to limited visibility into user activity and poor access management.
Privileged accounts with access to your critical systems and sensitive data are among the most vulnerable elements in cloud setups. When mismanaged, these accounts open the doors to unauthorized access, potential malicious activity, and data breaches. That's why strong privileged access management (PAM) is indispensable.
PAM plays an essential role in addressing the security challenges of complex infrastructures by enforcing strict access controls and managing the life cycle of privileged accounts. By employing PAM in hybrid and cloud environments, you're not just protecting your sensitive assets — you're also meeting compliance requirements and enhancing your overall security posture.
To secure your organization's hybrid or multi-cloud environment, consider implementing the following PAM best practices:
1. Centralize access controls#
Centralized access provisioning will remove the burden of constant maintenance and oversight from your admins' shoulders while keeping user accounts secure. This will guarantee the same level of access management consistency across all your IT infrastructure, ensuring no access point is overlooked and unprotected.
When looking for your privileged access management solution, pay attention to those supporting your organization's platforms, operating systems, and cloud environments. Try to find a single solution that can help you manage access across every endpoint, server, and cloud workstation.
2. Limit access to critical resources#
You can reduce the large attack surface of complex hybrid and cloud infrastructures by applying the principle of least privilege (PoLP) across your IT environments. PoLP means providing users with access necessary to perform their duties, limiting the exposure of sensitive data to potential malicious activity and exposure. Regular user access reviews can support your PoLP implementation.
You can take this principle a step further and implement a just-in-time (JIT) approach to access management. JIT PAM involves providing access on demand and for a limited time, which is enough to perform a specific task. This approach is specifically useful when providing temporary access to external users such as partners and third-party service providers.
3. Implement role-based access control#
Role-based access control (RBAC) involves granting access to assets based on the users' roles in your organization, aligning permissions with the principle of least privilege. In complex hybrid and multi-cloud setups, where resources are spread across many environments, RBAC simplifies access management by defining roles centrally and applying them consistently. In this access management model, each role has specific permissions, which helps minimize unnecessary access rights and prevents privilege misuse.
To implement RBAC effectively, your organization should thoroughly analyze your employees' job duties and define clear roles with appropriate access permissions. Consider regularly reviewing and updating the established roles to reflect any changes in responsibilities and organizational structures.
4. Adopt zero trust security principles#
Adopting zero trust in hybrid and multi-cloud environments involves implementing a framework where no user, device, or application is inherently trusted, regardless of whether they are inside or outside the network perimeter. For example, implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) will help you verify if the users are who they claim to be, protecting privileged accounts even if their credentials get compromised.
Zero trust also involves segmenting your resources. Segmentation is critical in environments where applications and resources are interconnected and shared, as it prevents lateral movement. With such an approach, even if one part of your network gets compromised, an attacker finds it difficult to reach other network segments. Segmentation also applies to privileged accounts, as you can isolate them from different parts of your system to reduce the impact of potential breaches.
5. Increase visibility into user activity#
When you can't clearly see what's happening in your hybrid and cloud environments, you're susceptible to human error, privilege abuse, account compromise, and, eventually, data breaches. By implementing PAM solutions with user activity monitoring capabilities, you can gain visibility into your IT perimeter and detect threats early on.
To enhance your monitoring processes, consider deploying software that alerts you about suspicious user activity and allows you to respond to threats. Integrating your PAM software with SIEM systems is also beneficial since it provides a centralized view of security events and privileged user activity.
6. Secure privileged credentials#
Credential theft cases are among the costliest cybersecurity incidents, averaging $679,621 per incident, according to the 2023 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by the Ponemon Institute. As high-level accounts hold the keys to your most important assets, the damage from compromising their credentials can be massive. That's why protecting them is crucial for the security of all IT infrastructures, including hybrid and multi-cloud ones.
To protect your privileged user credentials, develop password management policies outlining how to secure, store, and use passwords. To enforce these policies, consider implementing a password management solution that will allow you to safeguard passwords in a secure vault, provide single-use credentials, and automate password provisioning and rotation across all of your cloud environments.
7. Ensure cloud-native integration#
Consider using PAM solutions that integrate seamlessly with cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, utilizing their built-in capabilities to manage privileged access more effectively.
By leveraging privileged access management tools that integrate with cloud-native features such as IAM roles, API gateways, and secrets management, your organization can reduce complexity and enable automation.