Host Access Management:
Today's organizations are faced with a multitude of challenges, many of which relate to the management of user identities and access rights to protected information resources. Challenges include reducing the costs of security management, protecting critical corporate assets, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
These problems are particularly pressing when applied to the security of critical servers, many of which house confidential databases, files, and applications. Unauthorized access to these resources can wreak havoc with reputation and brand equity, as well as potentially leaving the organization at risk of significant legal action.
Security of host access management systems is generally provided by the native operating system on each host. However, native operating systems do not provide the level of security, as well as auditability, that is required not only for protection of critical assets, but also for compliance with relevant governmental or industry regulations. These native services do not protect resources with the level of granularity and accountability that is required. The result is heightened risk and exposure for critical assets, as well as making compliance efforts much more difficult.
To mitigate this problem, a specialized access management solution can be used to greatly strengthen the security of mission-critical servers. Such a solution can improve security, simplify and reduce the cost of server administration, and provide significantly improved audit capability for these systems.
A key issue to date has been the lack of clear and concise information that details:
- The inadequacies of native operating systems
- The capabilities of available host access management systems, and
- The requirements of organizations to meet their governance responsibilities.
This paper fills this gap and discusses the business need for host access management system security, and the requirements that a host access management solution should meet.
The Business Needs for Management of Access
IT executives face a multitude of difficult responsibilities and challenges, ranging from protecting critical sensitive assets, to providing an effective and convenient experience for users of the website, and ensuring regulatory compliance. These challenges can place complex, and even conflicting, demands on executives that often require comprehensive technology solutions.
One of the most pressing problems for IT executives is ensuring the security of the servers that host the organization's sensitive electronic assets, such as customer databases, hospital patient records or proprietary information. But, protecting these assets is difficult because the native operating system capabilities do not provide adequate protection against inadvertent or intentional attack, nor do they provide reliable auditing of the entire server environment. This problem is intensified when any critical systems or information are exposed to term-based contractors, hosted by service providers, or when the hosting systems for external customers contain confidential data and critical applications.
