Attacks against critical infrastructure and government agencies have been surging. Some attackers want to extort money; others intend to steal data. But the victims all have one thing in common: they need to be able to fend off attacks and recover so they can continue to perform their functions. That’s where cyber resilience comes in, a cornerstone of digital safety helped along by good privileged access management (PAM).

Cyber resilience means your organization can “anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks or compromises on systems” in terms of digital assets and tools. Security measures come ‘built in’ to the architecture and design. Moreover, this helps agencies better withstand attacks, faults and failures and continue to operate even in a degraded state. Business can keep running if you know your safety and information security are up to par.

Privileged Access Management Boosts Cyber Resilience

So, why should you consider PAM so important?

With PAM, you can secure, manage and monitor privileged (high-level or restricted) access to critical assets. PAM includes managing privileged access, password vaulting and management, multifactor authentication and session monitoring. A PAM solution can track the type of access assigned to each user and which servers they can access. If an attacker gets in to your systems, PAM can enable you to spin privileged access systems back up quickly and securely afterward. At best, it can prevent privileged account abuse in the first place.

So, PAM boosts cyber resilience because it brings together access control and management, monitors administrative accounts and enables recovery in one central location.

Real-World Examples: Don’t Forget Access Controls

Why is this so important? Well, privileged access management can help close gaps in other security measures. For example, what if you recover from an incident by booting up systems that lack admin access controls? That could lead to your systems coming back on line even less secure and more at-risk than they were in the first place.

Another way PAM boosts cyber resilience is enforcing least privilege and application control. This means even a trusted admin user can’t run just any command. So, if an outside attacker or an insider threat gets access to one account, they can’t open more doors from there.

In addition, you can pair PAM with artificial intelligence, active response and a zero trust approach. Using them together helps defend against attackers’ newest tactics.

For example, active response adds a SOAR tool to the mix, which can respond to incidents and suspend accounts, disconnect sessions or block access to thwart an attack before it gets very far. By using these in concert with privileged access management, you can cover more ground in terms of cyber resilience.