Delinea on Tuesday released a new book in print and digital form, "Cloud Server Privilege Management for Dummies," the aim of which was to have security teams better understand privileged access management in the cloud.
Tony Goulding, senior director, technical product marketing at Delinea, said the book will help security teams focus on some of the more important issues around cloud security.
These include: getting visibility into assets and permissions to foster proactive risk mitigation; reduce lateral movement between cloud resources to minimize data exfiltration or encryption for ransom if there’s a breach; and enforcing least privilege with a zero-trust approach to ensure that only authenticated users have access to the resources they need, when they need them.
“Security leaders need to switch from a reactive security posture to one that is more proactive, taking away implicit trust, enforcing least privilege and MFA everywhere, and consolidating identities,” said Goulding. “This new resource clearly shows what proactive hybrid cloud security looks like, and how to implement those best practices without creating productivity bottlenecks that can hamper business momentum.”
Jack Poller, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, added that privileged identities are literally the keys to the kingdom, giving the user access to all data and the ability to control system configurations, including creating new user accounts, thus giving the bad actors a backdoor back into the system. This makes privileged identities highly prized by both external attackers and malicious insiders such as employees, contractors, and other third parties.
“It’s paramount that organizations take a proactive approach to protecting and controlling access to their privileged identities," Poller said. "A ‘For Dummies’ book can help security pros and system administrators understand the importance and complexity of protecting privileged identities.”
Chris Vaughan, AVP of technical account management, EMEA at Tanium, said it’s quite easy to give people too many privileges in the cloud. Vaughan said access management can be quite granular, but it takes time to understand the implications of each choice.
“Many people jump in headfirst and simply want to ‘make it work,’ which means giving far too much access,” Vaughan said. “An introductory book like this if done well can be a terrific primer and potentially a reference item on your shelf.”
