Advisory Note: Privilege Management - 70177

Privilege Management - which, in the KuppingerCole nomenclature, is called PxM - is the term used for technologies which help to audit and limit elevated rights and what can be done with shared accounts. During the last few years, PxM has become increasingly popular. Some vendors have enhanced their offerings significantly, while acquisitions have also led to vendors with broader offerings.

The reason for that growth is the increasing demand in the market.
PxM is on its way out as a niche market and becoming a mandatory element of every Information Security and IAM (Identity and Access Management) infrastructure.

When looking at many of the large information security incidents which have become well-known during the past few years, it becomes obvious that many of them are related to privileged user accounts. Data theft on a large scale is most likely caused by users with elevated rights, typically administrative users. Thus it comes as no surprise that PxM is not only a topic which CIOs and CISOs have to look at but which auditors and regulators also have on their agenda. Compared with other types of IT technologies, the risk mitigation impacts of PxM as well as the audit relevance are exceptionally high.