Better visibility into privileged accounts may have stopped last summer’s Twitter breach. Today’s columnist, David Higgins of CyberArk, offers some insight on how breaches are caused when security teams overlook privileged accounts. (Credit: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Historically, privileged access management has focused on protecting  systems administrators and the powerful accounts used to manage critical infrastructure. Today, with the expanding adoption of cloud, DevOps, robotic process automation (RPA) and IoT – more privileged users, accounts and credentials are created every day.  

Instead of only IT admins handling privileged access on network servers, the need for privileged access has expanded to departments such as HR, marketing and finance that need access to sensitive business systems and collaboration tools such as SAP, Salesforce, Workday or Slack. In addition, as digital transformation initiatives have accelerated, the number of privileged credentials associated with not only humans, but also applications and machines, has grown exponentially.

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