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Cyberattacks continued to increase in 2020 and will constantly evolve in the future with increasing sophistication and blended techniques. Attacks on privileged accounts are expected to rise, as working from home and hybrid working environments will continue to prevail in the years to come due to the pandemic.

The digital transformation journey creates a greater attack surface for businesses, as companies tend to use different technologies and applications to facilitate the transformation process. The surge in adoption of applications and machines for daily business operations that require privileged access to the corporate’s services and database to perform their routine tasks are the weak points in the enterprise’s security architecture, as they can be vulnerable to cyberattacks. For example, the use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), business workload automation, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is creating a huge number of non-human identities with privileged access, which eventually expands the attack surface.

Thus, it is paramount that organizations have full visibility and control of their applications and machines to address issues related to privileged access. By implementing intelligent and automated PAM solutions, organizations are able to strengthen their security management over privileged accounts and access to reduce attack surfaces. PAM will help them effectively monitor and manage all privileged accounts and access to critical assets at every layer in the organization. PAM also enables businesses to achieve the least privilege principle by easily setting out zero-trust policies to all privileged accounts, normal accounts, applications, and endpoints, which will help detect high-risk activities and enable organizations to enhance their overall cybersecurity posture.