Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1387622
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 JUNE 2021 13 COMMERCIAL privilege access management which are scattered in the or- ganization, including discovery of hard-coded passwords in shell scripts and applications. Having the ability to discover unmanaged accounts ensures that organizations can effec- tively onboard and manage previously unknown accounts to the PAM solution. Successful onboarding will aid in improving the security posture of the organization giv- en that this would facilitate the secure, and automated chang- ing of account credentials in- line with policies stipulated by the organization. Further to this, prominent PAM manufacturers are pro- viding further value to this holistic privilege-management approach through additional controls. Just-In-Time provi- sioning is one prime example aimed at removing the con- tinual privileged access and instead providing elevated rights on a need basis for a lim- ited time frame. An additional benefit of PAM in the bid to manage privileged accounts most particularly in agile en- vironments, is availability of a dedicated DevOps Vaults and A p p l i c a t i o n - t o - A p p l i c a t i o n Management (AAPM). AAPM provides the ability for appli- cation accounts to seamlessly retrieve or inject account cre- dentials to or from the vault, addressing the risk of having hard-coded credentials within applications. These functionalities provide modern day organizations with an improved capability to tune their password and privileged account policies within their PAM to stipulate organization- al requirements, all of which assist in keeping the organi- zation's technical policies in- line with latest standards and exigencies of current threats. For this reason, PAM strate- gies and implementations are regarded as a necessity within organizations to improve the security posture in elements where large organizations lack visibility of elevated accounts within their environment which are a prime target and highly beneficial if acquired by malicious threat actors.