When you’re running a business, it’s hard to know exactly how much time your employees are spending on their work. Employees are likely not to report hours spent on non-work activities, so being able to see what they are doing at all times can be especially helpful. Privileged user monitoring software allows you to do just that, by tracking employees’ activities in real time to ensure that they are performing their jobs effectively and efficiently.
Types of Privileged Users
According to Application Security in Depth by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc, there are three types of privileged users.
- 1) Administrators (or root-level users): Administrators are members of groups that have unlimited administrative access to all levels of a system. They often have powers that normal users do not.
- 2) Service accounts: A service account is similar to an administrator account in that it has complete access to all areas of a computer or network. However, instead of being used for operations on behalf of an individual user, they are typically designed for use by services running on servers. These accounts allow programs with limited rights to operate on behalf of other users without requiring full administrative access themselves.
- 3) End-users with special privileges: This type of privileged user sits between regular users and administrators in terms of power, but does not have quite as much privilege as administrators do. For example, these users may be allowed to reset passwords for other users on their own computers.
As you can see, privileged user monitoring can be extremely important if these types of individuals exist within your organization. Not only do they need to monitor end-user activity; when privileged users make changes, changes can potentially impact how applications behave. Monitoring them makes sense when trying to ensure the safety of your end users and your applications. If you’re interested in gaining greater visibility into how privileged user activity impacts application security practices across your environment,
Why Privileged User Monitoring Matters
- As users start to become more comfortable with their new developer time tracking software, they’ll want to begin customizing settings and adding features. It’s important that IT makes sure privileged accounts are being used correctly, but doing so manually is a full-time job. Instead of having a member of your staff spend countless hours going through logs and network logs every day, install a privileged account monitoring tool. These tools allow you to monitor privileged accounts in real time or at any point in time after an incident has occurred. With these tools, you can set rules for who uses privileged accounts, when they use them and what actions are allowed while using them. Using these tools also eliminates possible security vulnerabilities by alerting administrators when privileged accounts have been logged into unexpectedly or if someone tries to change password information for one of these accounts without authorization.
- An effective privileged account management program ensures all policies and procedures are followed while preventing employee abuse. Staff members will know that their activities will be monitored which means there will be no back door access to IT resources like email servers or control panels. And you can rest assured that your organization is protected from internal threats, too; even rogue employees won’t be able to work unnoticed behind closed doors anymore because privileged user monitoring will make it impossible for them to go undetected.
- With a privileged account monitoring solution, you can keep tabs on everything that happens to your most sensitive systems from anywhere in the world. And with that peace of mind, maybe IT staffers will actually enjoy some work life balance! Companies today run 24/7 businesses, so nonstop support is a necessity—it doesn’t matter whether you have physical computer systems or cloud-based ones.
To learn more about our solutions, contact us today!
SOURCE: 5 Reasons to Always Keep an Eye on Privileged Business Accounts
