The Growing Importance of Privileged Access Management in Multicloud

The cloud has become near omnipresent in the corporate world, with recent research by Zippia claiming that 94% of enterprises worldwide are currently using cloud services. It enables businesses to enter the future with its scalability and enhanced performance. Yet, many of these businesses were built with legacy systems from the past, and the need of the hour for most of them is a middle ground to bridge the gap.

That’s why organizations are increasingly opting for multicloud & hybrid cloud strategies, driven to adopt them because of their portability, agility, and freedom of choice. Yet, the issue becomes one of interoperability. Each cloud platform comes with its own set of rules regarding roles, permissions, and privileges. Some come secure by design, others require fortification on your part. Therefore, effectively managing privileged access in multicloud across all platforms becomes essential. Do it right, and you will see positive results in terms of efficiency and security. Do it wrong, and your attack surface exponentially expands.

It’s a scenario that malicious actors are increasingly exploiting. According to the IBM Cost of Data Breach 2024, 40% of data breaches involved data stored across multiple environments. Moreover, breached data stored in public clouds incurred the highest specific average breach cost in the report at $5.17 million. 

Cloud misconfigurations are usually their way in, with the two most common weaknesses being operating on default configurations and neglecting proper segmentation of user/admin privileges. A recent breach on Toyota shows the gravity of this – a misconfiguration on one of their cloud platforms led to a decade-long data leak that exposed sensitive information of 2.15 million of their customers, including vehicle identification numbers, location, and in-vehicle video footage. 

So, how do we secure our access in a relatively new, highly complex environment like the cloud? Strong privileged access management (PAM) goes a long way toward protecting your data, applications, and critical systems from unauthorized access. This blog looks at 4 key success factors that will help you overcome PAM security challenges in cloud setups and provide you with the best practices for hybrid-cloud PAM.

4 Success Factors for Managing PAM in Multicloud

Success Factor #1: Visibility – Centralized dashboards and regulatory compliance

Depending on how many platforms you incorporate in your multicloud strategy, you could be looking at thousands of possible misconfigurations. Rather than managing multiple dashboards, each with its own proprietary role definition, you would be better off managing it all through a simplified, centralized solution that gives you total oversight of your cloud operations. 

With a PAM solution like ours, you get a unified dashboard that builds logs for analyzing behaviors, records user sessions, and isolates specific users to limit lateral movement. Moreover, it can help you seamlessly adhere to the various recent regulatory requirements being created for organizational cloud usage. For example, SEBI released the ‘Framework for Adoption of Cloud Services by SEBI Regulated Entities’ last year, to secure India’s financial markets from increasingly common cyberattacks. Adherence to all the guidelines there, including requirements regarding cloud access, storage, and encryption, is necessary to operate under SEBI’s scope.

Success Factor #2: Securing All Accounts – Zero-trust architecture and just-in-time access

There are many challenges associated with completely securing all your cloud accounts:

• Hybrid & multicloud ecosystems are outside the traditional security perimeters, and the risks associated with aspects like remote users and BYOD add to the attack surface. 
• As the cloud continues to evolve, so does the definition of a user in it. Entities like devices, applications, and VMs require their own identities, just like your human employees. 
• Many cloud platforms have standing privileges where user privileges are enabled indefinitely, regardless of context. This could lead to dormant users or inactive accounts with retained access, something that often goes unnoticed in expansive cloud environments and offers backdoor entries for attackers to exploit.

Therefore, considering the circumstances, all network devices have to be regarded as potential threats and need constant verification to ensure identity. Adopting a zero-trust architecture is crucial in this complex business environment. NIST defines zero trust as a framework that “assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their physical or network location” and that “authentication and authorization of both subject and device are discrete functions before a session.”

Our PAM solution incorporates all the essential aspects of the zero trust architecture that makes it such an attractive proposition for cloud adopters:

• To eradicate all the risks associated with standing privileges, our PAM solution offers just-in-time access (JIT), where privilege for accessing apps and systems is limited to predetermined periods, on a need basis. With effective network segmentation to support this, you can grant privileges at the point required and ensure there is no movement for attackers across the system. These time-based access controls bring a balance of usability and security without any lengthy approvals that can bring down employee productivity.
• You can bring granularization to your cloud configuration through fine-grained policies & rulesets for all your devices. This can go in many different ways. It allows you to add more context to your approval paths, setting specific alerts at various points that inform you of anomalies and unusual behavior. Additionally, it can be situational where factors are validated only at specific times or geolocations.
• Phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for users connecting remotely, using strong factors like physical passkeys and biometrics. This turns cloud-based complexity into a security strength – hackers will face the same complexities, and it is less likely that they will be able to access all the authentication factors at once.
• We supplement all this through continuous monitoring, which contextualizes human behavior and immediately notifies you in our unified dashboard of any aberrations from the norm.

Finally, it is equally important to keep track of the accounts granting all this access. Non-vaulted admin accounts could be a serious vulnerability, so there should be a foolproof mechanism to detect & vault new admins while effectively managing existing ones.

Success Factor #3: Storing Your Secrets – Rotating credentials and vaulting secrets

Providing privileged access to accounts is only one part of the puzzle. Attackers also target honeypots that contain organizational secrets like tokens, passwords, public/private key pairs, and API keys. Either route will give them access to your organization. Therefore, if these secrets remain static and unrotated, the risk factor increases dramatically.

There must be a mandatory policy to rotate secrets at regular intervals and revoke them instantly in the case of a suspected breach. Our secrets management solution, as part of our overall PAM, has strict controls to ensure this. By facilitating auto-login through credential injection, local secrets can be vaulted centrally rather than be kept on-premises, with regular schedules of rotation.

Success Factor #4: Automation – Efficiency and security at scale

Securing your PAM requires a unified approach across people, processes, and technology. When it comes to training and raising awareness amongst your employees, it’s important to encourage buy-in by explaining the rationale rather than simply saying ‘Do this and don’t do that.’

However, they alone will not help you completely tackle an ever-expanding multicloud infrastructure, where there are thousands of different moving parts. Automation with strict controls could help you significantly with the dual benefits of increasing efficiency and enhancing security. Here are some of the ways we use automation to give you a more optimized PAM:

• Predefining access rules based on scope and specific requirement
• Immediately revoking and deactivating dormant/inactive accounts
• Canceling privileges based on your organizational context
• Taking immediate action when malicious behavior is detected
• Allowing faster self-service access at scale

Following these 4 success factors go a long way in providing a successful PAM in multicloud environments. We hope this blog helped you discover best practices for managing privileged access across hybrid & multicloud environments to ensure security & compliance for organizations. Connect with us today to incorporate a PAM for yours!